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00:00A distress call, a threat, an invitation, but the message has been leaked. It reads, somewhere in the heavens, they
00:08are waiting.
00:10Welcome to Mojo Plays, and if you're looking for proof that gaming corporate executives are completely out of touch with
00:16their customer base,
00:17look no further than the long list of PlayStation games that had all their potential ruined by corporate oversight.
00:23How do you explain the collateral damage your team leaves in its wake?
00:30Enthusiasm?
00:34Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest
00:39videos.
00:42The Last of Us Online, or Factions 2.
00:47I'm wounded!
00:51Naughty Dog spent years building a standalone follow-up to one of the best multiplayer modes Sony ever shipped,
00:57only to watch the live service Gold Rush collapse under its own weight.
01:01The project sat near 80% done, and was testing well.
01:05But then, the same executives who had demanded a pipeline of Forever Games suddenly decided Naughty Dog shouldn't become a
01:12live service studio after all.
01:14This wasn't just a creative pivot.
01:16It was a boardroom that sprinted toward a trend, tripped over the invoice, and left a nearly complete game in
01:22the hallway.
01:23Fans who just wanted new maps and the old faction's tension instead got a press release about heritage.
01:29Sony got yet another expensive lesson, and will pretend they learned their lesson the next time they decide another game
01:36unnecessarily needs recurring revenue.
01:38And all the while, the mode players actually enjoyed and wanted that never needed to become a second job for
01:44the whole studio,
01:45was left behind with the end of the world.
01:52Resistance 4
02:01Ted Price has said the pitch for Resistance 4 was a real concept with people inside the studio who still
02:07cared about the Chimera and that weird 1950s war.
02:11Insomniac wanted to keep going.
02:13Fans wanted to keep going.
02:15But Sony didn't.
02:16The stated reason was as stupid as you'd expect.
02:20Portfolio balance.
02:22Apparently, too many flavors of Apocalypse on one console was one flavor too many for the people holding the checkbook.
02:28Resistance never had the cultural weight of Naughty Dog's baby, so it was the easier one to kill.
02:34The first-party shooter series that helped sell the PS3 got treated like leftover inventory once a shinier catastrophe showed
02:41up on the calendar.
02:42Sony decided they wanted a leaner slate of apocalyptic games before greenlighting Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone.
02:49Apparently, the Chimera and their ongoing war were just a bit too end of the world for the PS4 generation
02:55of Sony.
03:09I just have to win Calypso's stupid little contest.
03:18Sony wanted Sweet Tooth and Twisted Metal back in time for the TV series, but then bounced the project from
03:25Lucid to Firesprite like a hot potato that also needed Battle Royale DNA.
03:29Vehicular combat was never going to be enough on its own for PS5 gen Sony, so it had to be
03:35a live-service last-one standing shooter with cars, because that was the hot genre that year.
03:41Then, the live-service push got shredded in a layoff round, and the game vanished before it was even fully
03:47greenlit.
03:48A series that used to be loud, mean, and unapologetically over-the-top got drafted into the same forever content
03:54army that ate factions and a pile of other unannounced projects.
03:59Instead of a proper single-player entry, Twisted Metal got some blurred screenshots on a former employee's resume.
04:05The clown still demands carnage, but if Sony can't monetize the hell out of it, apparently no one makes it
04:12to the arena.
04:12They think they're safe, tucked away inside their god, but they don't realize that their own weapons will do their
04:20death.
04:21The Last Guardian
04:22Famito Ueda has been polite about it for years, but still managed to say the quiet part out loud.
04:29The years of radio silence for The Last Guardian, as well as the jump from PS3 to PS4, weren't some
04:35artistic whims from Team Ico.
04:37They were demands from Sony themselves.
04:39The game had been tuned for the cell's strange guts, but Sony decided the new box mattered more, so large
04:46chunks of that work went in the trash, and the clock started over.
04:50Ueda has said he would have been fine shipping on PS3, but Sony wanted the prestige title sitting on the
04:56hardware they were selling that holiday season.
04:59The result was a beautiful game that arrived late, exhausted, and missing the cultural moment it would have owned.
05:05The years of silence were a rebuild order, forced on the devs when the PS3 was still capable of carrying
05:12the boy and the beast.
05:14Fuse
05:14The client was able to reconstruct several security grabs from inside the east wing.
05:19The status and nature of the threat is unknown, but whatever it is, it's hostile.
05:25Overstrike was pure Insomniac being Insomniac, full of loud colors and co-op chaos that didn't want to be another
05:32brown military shooter.
05:34But Fuse grounded the jokes and the palette went the color of a briefing room.
05:38Insomniac has talked about weapons needing more heft, which is a fair design note on its own,
05:44but the larger shift still diluted the personality of the original idea into the same generic cover-based shooter aesthetic
05:50already on the shelf.
05:52Whether the pressure came from the new publisher relationship or from years of watching what Sony actually greenlit,
05:58the distinctive version died first.
06:00What shipped was competent but forgettable,
06:03and a warning about what happens when a weird idea gets dressed for a meeting it never asked to attend.
06:09Players who wanted the cartoon heist got a muted tactical outing instead,
06:13and the sales chart once again proved how out of touch corporate executives truly are.
06:18The Grigori will be on the hunt, and without your team, I'm not confident we'll be able to stop them.
06:25Want to see some games that had a much happier ending?
06:28Then head to Mojo Play's 24-7 livestream for all the best content the gaming has to offer.
06:33Scan the QR code on screen to join us live for non-stop fun.
06:37Helldivers 2.
06:39No!
06:40Sweet Liberty!
06:41No!
06:45Ha ha.
06:46Look familiar?
06:48Arrowhead shipped an unexpected hit, and even PC players showed up in droves.
06:53But then, Sony waited until the party was packed,
06:56and tried to bolt a mandatory PSN login onto a game that was already succeeding without one,
07:03and unsurprisingly, review scores tanked.
07:06The store page vanished in more than 100 countries that can't even create a PSN account.
07:11For a few ugly weeks, the biggest PlayStation success in years looked like a hostage situation run by account services.
07:19Eventually, they walked it back, but only because the internet set the building on fire,
07:24not because someone in a glass office suddenly discovered empathy.
07:28A live service game that was doing fine got turned into a case study in how to snatch defeat from
07:33a perfectly good launch.
07:35Managing democracy shouldn't include asking PC players whether they wanted a second login screen after they already paid.
07:42The glory of Super Earth deserves better.
07:52Daredevil, the man without fear.
07:54Daredevil had a small team and a linear brawler that understood the character.
07:58However, Sony smelled a movie tie-in and a trend and decided Hell's Kitchen needed open-world padding and Tony
08:05Hawk rails.
08:06Marvel wanted the blind vigilante, but Sony wanted the flavor of the month welded onto him,
08:12and the two visions spent the budget arguing while the studio cracked under the scope change,
08:16unfortunately leading to the project collapsing before it could embarrass everyone in public.
08:21Daredevil grinding a fire escape is the kind of idea that only survives a meeting
08:25where nobody in the room has read the comic and expected tonal and gameplay mechanics to fit like a square
08:31peg in a round hole.
08:33Sony didn't just interfere, it tried to turn a street-level hero into a checklist of whatever was popular,
08:39then acted surprised when the developers couldn't share a building anymore.
08:43The only thing this devil fears is corporate interference.
08:47Hayes.
08:47Heads up, my boys. It's that time again.
08:50I'm not going.
08:53Sure is better than coffee and a slap in the face.
08:56Free Radical knew shooters, and TimeSplitters was proof.
09:00However, their new project got steered onto the PS3 as an exclusive at the exact moment that machine was a
09:07hostile place to build an FPS,
09:09then coerced into the Halo and Call of Duty silhouette everyone else was chasing.
09:13What could have been a nasty little war story with the studio's personality became another mid-tier shooter on a
09:20platform that didn't want any more mid-shooters.
09:23Exclusivity was sold as focus, but by the time it landed, the conversation had moved on,
09:28and Free Radical was already on the clock, taking away toward a much worse ending.
09:33Sony got another exclusive logo on a box during a generation that desperately wanted familiar shooters on its hardware,
09:40and players got a game that felt designed by committee and shipped by calendar,
09:44then watched the studio that made it pay for the privilege of being PlayStation family shut down.
09:49Here it was just, uh, mismanaged.
09:53I would combine it with free will.
09:56What?
09:57Lair.
09:58There was one belief shared by order,
10:00that whoever controlled the skies had dominion over the land.
10:11Factor 5 proved they already knew how to fly with their Star Wars Rogue Squadron games,
10:16but Sony needed a 6-axis showcase,
10:18and a dragon game looked like the perfect commercial for tilting the controller at your television.
10:23Players discovered that steer the dragon by waving the pad is a great sentence in a press briefing,
10:29but a miserable way not to crash into a mountain.
10:32Analog options already existed in the build,
10:34but still lost the argument that mattered with even the designers stating they were not happy shipping it that way.
10:41The game became a punchline about motion controls instead of a spectacle about the war in the sky it was
10:46intended to be.
10:47When your hardware gimmick matters more than whether the dragon goes where the player pointed,
10:52you didn't ship a game,
10:53you shipped a demo for an accessory,
10:55and hoped the fire breathing would distract from the steering.
10:58Spoiler, it did not.
11:00Rebuild.
11:02Rebuild as one.
11:05So much has been destroyed.
11:08It'll never be the same.
11:10Marathon.
11:11A certain subject psyche is preserved outside their body in the event of shell death.
11:16Take my thing from the vehicle.
11:18Take my damage to us.
11:19The original Marathon was a single-player sci-fi shooter with a brain,
11:23but under Sony,
11:24Bungie turned the name into another live-service extraction loop
11:28because that was the category the acquisition was supposed to feed.
11:31Destiny's long tail got wound down while this new bet was asked to carry the studio.
11:36A classic IP that could have been a sharp, finite campaign became content seasons
11:41and another service that had to keep justifying itself.
11:44Sony didn't buy Bungie to fund a weird old Mac FPS with modern production values.
11:50It bought a live-service engine and then pointed a beloved name at the same whole Concord,
11:55factions, and the Twisted Metal experiment already fell into.
11:58When this one inevitably stumbles,
12:00it won't be because nobody remembered the lore,
12:02it'll be because nobody ever asked whether gamers wanted another legacy series to be infinite,
12:08just whether the next earnings call can show investors another live-service still running.
12:13Mida is answers to questions as weapons.
12:17Mida is not your friend.
12:21Which Sony disaster do you think could have easily been avoided?
12:25Share your picks in the comments.
12:27Did you enjoy this video?
12:29Check out these other clips for Mojo Plays,
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