Days Gone currently sits at 84 on Metacritic user reviews and has a sustained "very positive" aggregate on Steam, same as Horizon and Death Stranding.
Furthermore, as has been pointed out, Sony had no working knowledge of future events when they made their decisions. They based their decision on initial critical reviews and initial sales and drew assumptions leading to the conclusion the brand was too toxic to the Sony brand and to build a tentpole around.
Those assumptions were unequivocally incorrect. Considering the positive word of mouth and current resting state of positivity around the franchise and the 10 million in sales.
Coming up with post hoc rationalizations and defenses to defend their decisions says to me the subconscious goal is pointing at being more about defending Sony than assessing their actual decision-making process in an objective manner. Based on the evidence we have, Sony made an incorrect predictive forecast based on a heavily reliance on faulty metrics and the result is the team is now ironically in the very situation that cancellation was justified to seemingly try and avoid.
I don't think user reviews are a good barometer for anything. Way too many stories about them beeing influenced by some agendas. Racist People hating a game, people voting for a game in spite of another or because they thought it was unfairly treated etc...
I lost any trust in those and don't look at them anymore, because I saw so many games who just received 1/10 or 10/10 scores without even explaining why this score was given or a media product already having 1000s of reviews despite not even beeing released to the wide public. Also I think most people who vote there often do it to either hate or push the score. As someone who thought the game was just average, I don't really have any interest to score there or to express my opinion about these game in any way.
I just disagree with your notion that the general word of mouth for Days Gone is positive, I think it is rather mixed. There are obviously people who liked the game and that is completely fine, but I think there is also a big amount of people who just didn't really care all that much but like mentioned above don't have any interest to express that opinion because they probably already forgot about the game. That's why polls with 1000s of people in threads often point a different picture than comments in threads like "Game XYZ is overrated, Game XYZ is amazing and critics are wrong etc.."
Let's be honest if it wasn't for Ross comments we wouldn't talk about Days Gone today either.
You and me both neither know what the sales potential of Days Gone 2 exactly is. Good sales of the first game aren't a good indicator alone for me. We saw first games, that are considered bad, selling well and then the sequel paid the price for it. Watch Dogs 1 to 2 or AC Unity to Syndicate come to mind, where the often regarded better sequels saw a decline in sales because the first game burned a lot of people. A lot of people like me tried Days Gone out, especially when it was on sale, because Playstation's first party titles in general created a reputation of usually quality titles, so I wanted to see if there is more to the game, but then realized nope it's nowhere near the level of their usual offerings. There are probably a lot more people like that, who are likely to skip a potential Days Gone 2.
I don't have any need to defend Sony. They are a multibillion company and not my friends. But I don't think they just make decisions like that without doing their own research and considering many factors. If you only look at the sales numbers the decision might be odd, if you look at other mentioned factors it doesn't look that odd to me anymore.
We do have evidence, from the developers that were told by Sony why their games were cancelled, and the developers that work under Sonys new strategy.
ive already posted this twice now:
The team's failure highlights the complex hierarchy of video game development and in particular, Sony's conservative approach to making games for the PlayStation 5. The Japanese conglomerate owns about a dozen studios across the world as part of its PlayStation Studios label, but in recent years it has prioritized games made by its most successful developers. Studios such as Santa Monica, California-based Naughty Dog and Amsterdam-based Guerrilla Games spend tens of millions of dollars to make games with the expectation that the investments will pay off exponentially.
Sony's focus on exclusive blockbusters has come at the expense of niche teams and studios within the PlayStation organization, leading to high turnover and less choice for players. Last week, Sony reorganized a development office in Japan, resulting in mass departures of people who worked on less well-known but acclaimed games such as Gravity Rush and Everybody's Golf. The company has informed developers that it no longer wants to produce smaller games that are only successful in Japan, Bloomberg has reported.
This fixation on teams that churn out hits is creating unrest across Sony's portfolio of game studios. Oregon-based Sony Bend, best known for the 2019 open-world action game Days Gone, tried unsuccessfully to pitch a sequel that year, according to people familiar with the proposal. Although the first game had been profitable, its development had been lengthy and critical reception was mixed, so a Days Gone 2 wasn't seen as a viable option.
Instead, one team at the studio was assigned to help Naughty Dog with a multiplayer game while a second group was assigned to work on a new Uncharted game with supervision from Naughty Dog. Some staff, including top leads, were unhappy with this arrangement and left. Bend's developers feared they might be absorbed into Naughty Dog, and the studio's leadership asked to be taken off the Uncharted project. They got their wish last month and are now working on a new game of their own that will be part of a brand new franchise.
A small team had big ambitions for a Last of Us remake, but Sony handed the work to star studio Naughty Dog.
www.bloomberg.com
Combine that with first hand accounts from Bend and other reports posted in this thread about Sony heavily reliant on Metacritic and initial sales to dictate decision-making, and nothing I said is unsubstantiated by the evidence we have.
Sony made their decision on Days Gone's future very soon after release and cited Metacritic and initial sales as their reasoning for concluding poor expected future brand performance, so, in keeping with the blockbuster strategy, they moved them to tentpole franchises to help out. That reasoning, however, proved to be faulty given the word of mouth ended up endearing the brand and the sales reached 10 million
I don't think you are doing yourself a favor to point to the Bloomberg article as "evidence".
The article was heavily criticised from many people back then in the specific thread. I myself wrote a very long, detailled post why I thought the article was very flawed and one of Jason's weakest works. In short summary I thought Jason took 2 little stories and blow it completely out of proportion including a very misleading and click-baity headline. Completely normal stuff like "Naughty Dog beeing involved in a remake of their own big IP" or "Studios supporting other projects while they are not working on their next big game" were somehow used to create a misleading story of Sony just doing the same blockbusters all over again.
It's also only one side of the coin. We don't know the other side and we most likely will never know. We for example don't know if everyone at Bend wanted to work on Days Gone 2 that desperately after Ross and Garvin left.
In fact Ross and Garvin's interviews with Jaffe kind of suggested that there was a bit of a split within Bends's team between the old guard and newer devs.
Maybe it's just me but some of their comments sound a little bit like "old man yells at clouds" to me in the way they complained about the newer generation of devs and how they felt out of place. And that they go to Jaffe to talk about it kind of gives me the same feeling. Because there is no one better at "yelling at clouds" than David Jaffe himself, who comes across very bitter and childish because he isn't relevant and Playstation doesn't want anything to do with him anymore. I for myself don't think Bend set the world on fire in the last few years, so I think a fresh start and a new team working on a new IP is actually something to be excited for and I hope they are doing well.
What we know is that Sony did greenlight a new IP for Sony Bend instread of a sequel to a rather generic Days Gone, which sold well, which is actually the opposite of risk-averse for me, isn't it?
We also know Sony is supporting new titles by Media Molecule, PixelOpus or Asobi. They are financing the next, experimential game from Jade Raymond's new studio alongside other partnerships. They supported a game like Returnal and even bought Housemarque, who aren't known for AAA blockbusters either. They are launching a new VR headset next year which will come with many, interesting and cool "experiences" too. So this whole notion of Sony doing only blockbusters is a bit played out for me.
Are blockbusters important to their strategy? Yes without a doubt. Are they only doing blockbusters and nothing else? No definitely not.
