[Rumor/Linkedin] Ex-Deviation Games employees set up a new studio with Sony (Led by Jason Blundel, New IP)
- Thread starter Angie
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They clearly didn't poach the leadership and people where happy to leave.
I have no clue how Sony could shut down a 3rd party studio.
Maybe they could cancel the publishing contract if certain goals aren't met which could lead to studio closure because of lost finances.
Earliest that Arrowhead said publically they where developing Helldivers 2 was 3rd of December 2020. So probably not 8-9 years to make it (like beyond prototyping).
Again if someone is able to correct I'll be happy to oblige.
It was sort of an open secret but this is pretty much confirmation that this is an actual new studio being established within Sony.
Ah I see.
Still don't think all that time was on full production. Probably those first few years prototyping the hell out of it.
Yeah, I wasn't calling you out or anything, just expanding on your point. Nowadays games take time and sometimes they get canceled and/or rebooted and take even more time. Nothing we can do about it but wishing them well
Maybe it's not a new studio but just a new "team" inside one of Sony's offices. It looks like this team is in California. So they could be a new team at Sony HQ in San Mateo (where PixelOpus was), at Visual Arts (they're trying for quite some time to get their own dev team) or at San Diego Studio (MLB The Show).
They did learn their lesson. They got rid of the bad management.
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Because is probably that far away.
No need to announce the studio without anything to show up with it
Yeah that's true, I just feel like the Sony Interactive Entertainment on all the LinkedIn profiles shows a level of secrecy that I wouldn't usually expect for a new team at an existing studio (unless that studio isn't on LinkedIn like San Diego Studio) since normally that's fairly open knowledge
The partnership with Deviation Games was announced early in development with a lot of fanfare and we saw how that ended up. Think the plan will be to get things in place low key before a formal announcement for widescale recruitment.
Have I got this right?
1. 2021: Sony announces partnership with Deviation on a new game (inspired by Call of Duty multiplayer?)
2. 2021-2022: Deviation grows massively and opens up new offices, puts PlayStation controllers everywhere
3. Rumors arise of problems with partnership, Deviation scales back growth
4. 2022-2023: Blundell leaves. He and some former staff said to be working for PlayStation
5. 2024: Deviation shuts down
If most of the team moved over to a secret PlayStation studio, would they be able to continue where they left off or start over? Question of cost of paying to buy the IP rights vs cost of starting over.
1. 2021: Sony announces partnership with Deviation on a new game (inspired by Call of Duty multiplayer?)
2. 2021-2022: Deviation grows massively and opens up new offices, puts PlayStation controllers everywhere
3. Rumors arise of problems with partnership, Deviation scales back growth
4. 2022-2023: Blundell leaves. He and some former staff said to be working for PlayStation
5. 2024: Deviation shuts down
If most of the team moved over to a secret PlayStation studio, would they be able to continue where they left off or start over? Question of cost of paying to buy the IP rights vs cost of starting over.
As someone who almost always plays single player only games, these all sound the same to me... Why would I want 3 PVP first person shooter MP games? I like that at least 1 of them has a campaign, I guess.
Am I the only one shocked at senior developers calling out their colleagues like that in public? I always thought they have their own circle.
With the way PlayStation usually work, they probably already own everything created during the development of Deviation's game.
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That's a great point. They do tend to have these "second party" relationships where the IP is owned by PS but the studio is independent.
Same reason that someone who doesn't play open world games would want Spider-Man, Horizon, and Ghost of Tsushima.
That is to say, they won't want them.
While purging any of the rotten management apples.
Seems like it worked well for everyone, including the developers.
To someone who plays mostly multiplayer games I can assure you that by the descriptions above those are 3 wildly different game types.
Ah ok. So i take it the difference is in the universes they've crafted, the setting, lore, the feel of the gameplay etc?
I guess in my head when I heard the descriptions I thought of Call of Duty Zombies and then Battlefield and then Destiny, which seem too similar to each other. But it could also be TF2, L4D2, CS2 which are wildly different.
Concord could be a galaxy spanning game, whilst FireSprite's could be much more grounded, then the secret studio's could be more fantastical.
I guess now I'm more intrigued!
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Just seem clear that Sony really believes in the pitch, to a point to create a new studio fro the ground up, but didn't believe in management
playstation players for years have been asking ,where are the FPS, well sony is bringing not one, but many of them
I hope it's true about this. If this was Sony's way of weeding out people that needed to go (supposedly toxic environment) and start from scratch, then I'm glad they didn't give up on those that deserve the work and deserve to be employed.
Kind of. I guess in my head it's like comparing Overwatch (Concord), Hunt: Showdown (Marathon), and Call of Duty (Blundell's game, assuming it's actually what people are expecting).
All very different games, with different mechanics and gameplay loops, different visual styles, and different tones.
Concord - sounds like a pvp game that's hopefully more COD than Overwatch.
Marathon - an extraction shooter with pvevp elements.
Blundel game - we can only hope the true successor to COD Zombies.
Start to finish they will all be unique game play experiences with no overlap beyond surface level pvp
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That second LinkedIn post. Man, if this kind of thing was happening at Deviation, imagine what's happening at the bigger publishers.
Sounds like they course corrected and made the right decisions for staff at Deviation that were best trying to make things work.
September 8, 2022 - Jason Blundell leaves
May 2023 - Deviation undergoes layoffs.
Sony needs to release whatever game they come.up with especially if its PVP on PC day 1. Any multiplayer game now should be on PC day 1.
They've long said that all multiplayer games are going to be Day 1 on PC.
Oh cool. Now I'm sad about TLOU factions.
As a big fan of FPS I am interested to see more AAA entries in the genre, but I really hope some of these have campaigns too. I'd love to see some FPS with the polish and narrative focus that games like The Last of Us or God of War received.
I'm not sure who Sony is meant to be shutting down in your sentence?
Probably not for about 4 years!
Is it safe to assume that? Sounds like a pretty big leap from the basically zero information we have so far.
Who didn't?
I don't imagine someone like Jason Blundell is going to struggle hiring people to join his FPS studio, and there's no other benefit to announcing something like this so early.
A bit, but I am guessing they must really have been a shitshow. I'm guessing they're not going to be working in the industry again so he has no fear of burning any bridges!
This is probably the most synthetized explanation of all this lol. Good luck to devs to see what the come out with in the future.
Naughty Dog wanted to go this route with TLOU Online, Sony only gave them the time and resources to see it through. Also important to remember that ND hasn't been a solely single player studio for a very long time. They've been doing MP modes for their games for many years.
Also worth remembering that TLOU Online wasn't shuttered due to the game being bad and looking like it'd be a failure. It was due to a game that scale requiring all the resources of ND to support, which would eliminate any other projects they'd want to be working on.
We're probably not too far away from Sony showing off more large scale live service games like Guerrillas Horizon Online game.
Slight correction, they said all live service games.
There are single player live service games (Genshin Impact and other Hoyoverse stuff), and there are non-live service multiplayer games (It Takes Two, Resident Evil 5).
Basically, if it has a recurring revenue model then they'll put it on PC day one. If it's a one and done game that features multiplayer, then it's probably hitting PS5 first.
Sad thing is none of them are appealing as either a Sony shooter fan(Resistance, Killzone, Socom. MAG, Warhawk)
or a general shooter fan.
I'll give it a chance but Marathon for example just seems like a dumb waste of Bungie