Bend Studio Ruckus: Resistance Open-World Pitch Rejected; Was Days Gone a Commercial Success?

For those unaware, Bend Studio is Sony’s longest running game development Studio, dating all the way back to the early days of the PS1 starting with the Syphon Filter series.

They’ve also worked on different IPs within the PlayStation library including Uncharted and Resistance, until their newest IP launched, Days Gone, launched in 2019.

Remember the Bend Studio ruckus from earlier last year? That Sony has turned down the pitch for a potential Days Gone sequel? Well, the entire situation is once again dominating the headlines.

Jeff Ross, longtime Bend Studio employee and Creative Director of Days Gone who left the studio after 20 years, commented on the news regarding Ghost of Tsushima selling 8 million copies, because according to his information, DG also sold as many yet didn’t get the greenlight for a sequel.

At the time I left Sony, Days Gone had been out for a year and a half (and a month), and sold over 8 million copies. It's since gone on to sell more, and then a million+ on Steam. Local studio management always made us feel like it was a big disappointment. #daysgone #PlayStation https://t.co/KMZr2pGe9r
— Jeff Ross (@JakeRocket) January 5, 2022

You’re probably thinking, ‘what the hell, Sony?!’, Before you start throwing your stones, Jeff jumped on David Jaffe’s YouTube show, explaining how he used GameStat’s numbers, which tracted the overall trophy count for a game. The only issue is that it doesn’t differentiate between being a PS Plus/PS Plus collection download or if it was a used copy or bought brand new.

Where I got my data from, I had access to a lot of telemetry, and I could see stuff and when we were at 5 million copies – when we were announced at 5 million copies – the telemetry data was at 5.8 [million]. There are basically resells or shared discs. I was actually using an external website – I think they’re offline now – but they were using trophy data and it lined up with our internal telemetry data so for me, it’s like, ‘good enough.’

I think [Gamestat] still has the data archived,” Ross continued. “Based off the 8 million mark, it matched our telemetry and so I’m like, ‘good enough.’ So maybe it was 7.7 [million]-ish, maybe it was 8.2 [million]-ish, I don’t know.

When it ultimately comes down to it, we might never see another title from the world of Days Gone, which is a bummer, but that didn’t stop Jeff and his team from pitching other ideas to Sony, such as an open-world Resistance!

The pitch I was making was: ‘open-world Resistance would be fucking rad’. [We had] all these open world loops that we figured out. It almost wrote itself with Resistance, there’s so many aspects of that property that lends itself to open-world gameplay. But they weren’t interested in that either, and I don’t know how well it sold. They were interested in almost anything except for a Days Gone 2.

So what is Bend Studio working on? They confirmed it’s a new IP earlier last year, with rumors of it being a Men in Black game. It has also been said that they’re helping Naughty Dog with The Last of Us Part II Factions multiplayer mode as production for their new IP continues to ramp up.

What would you like to see next from Bend Studio?

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