Sony's Live-Service Gamble Cost Us Bend Studio's Days Gone 2
Eight years on, Fortnite’s shockwave still fuels a live-service gold rush, pulling in giants like Sony and Bend Studio— and new revelations suggest the scramble for recurring revenue may have cost players a promising game.
Fortnite didn't just change gaming in 2017, it rewired the business. Eight years later, the ripple effects are still smacking studios around. Case in point: Sony's push into live-service seems to have sidelined a Days Gone sequel, sent Bend Studio chasing a different project, and ended with that project getting canned anyway.
How Sony's live-service pivot swallowed Bend Studio's next game
After buying Bungie and watching Destiny 2 print money, Sony leaned hard into live-service. Bend Studio, the team behind Days Gone, got pulled into that strategy with an online project called 'Mirror Pond.' Then Sony killed it. Layoffs followed at Bend. And with the studio tied up on a multiplayer experiment for years, any shot at Days Gone 2 basically evaporated.
A dev lays out what went wrong
Robert Morrison, a senior animator who worked at Bend, said the quiet part out loud on X on October 29, 2025. According to him, the team just didn't move the ball far enough down the field over a long stretch, so the cancellation wasn't exactly a surprise.
"To be fair we didn't make enough substantial progress over the 3 years I was there. I saw the eventual cancellation coming prior to it."
That lines up with the timeline: Bend spent years on a live-service pitch that ultimately didn't survive Sony's shifting plans.
So where does that leave Days Gone 2?
Short answer: nowhere good. Days Gone launched in 2019 with a shaky start, pulled itself together over time, and then found a second life with a successful PC port. It also brought in around $100 million in digital sales and built a dedicated fanbase. Still, a sequel was never greenlit.
Complicating things further, original creative director John Garvin has said he isn't interested in a sequel unless co-director Jeff Ross returns. Both left Bend in 2020. Put all that together with years spent on 'Mirror Pond,' and it's easy to see why Days Gone 2 looks like a dead end.
The bigger picture at PlayStation
- The Last of Us Online was officially canceled.
- Concord launched and was shut down after just 12 days.
- Sony once talked up a slate of 12 multiplayer titles by 2025. As of now, the ones still actively in the works are Bungie's Marathon and Haven Studios' PvP project.
The takeaway
Chasing live-service money has been rough for Sony. Bend Studio was pointed at an online game that didn't make it out alive, and in the process, the studio's most obvious next step — Days Gone 2 — probably slipped away for good. Even if the fan demand is there, the people who built the first game have moved on, and the company's attention is somewhere else entirely.