In case you haven’t heard the big news of the day: Sony and developer Firewalk Studios will be closed Unitythe non-Guardians of the Galaxy Hero shooter that fall hard since its release on August 23. The studio appears to be planning some sort of comeback, as the announcement states that the September 6 shutdown is so the team can “explore options” on what they will do next. In the meantime, anyone who purchased the game is eligible for a full refund.
Whether you like Unity or not, that should unsettle you. Sony and Firewalk invested a lot of time and money into this game as part of their big live service push, and it flops so badly that Sony is pulling the plug before it can even celebrate its one-month birthday. At some point in PlayStation business meetings, Sony was willing to invest heavily in the game and an expanded universe created from it. There’s even an episode based on the game that will appear in Amazon’s upcoming anthology series Secret level coming in DecemberThis episode could be the last gasp of a game that was called off in just two weeks.
How did we get here? People have a lot of theories, and the implications for PlayStation and the state of the video game industry as a whole are not pretty. Let’s look at some of the internet’s reactions to the (supposedly temporary) death of Unity.
Sympathy for the developers
Many people who have worked in a corporation, especially in creative fields, know the pain of seeing big guys make decisions that inevitably lead to the slow decline of something people love. As the public has become more aware of working conditions in the video game industry, there is a natural inclination for some people to worry about the designers, artists and programmers who will inevitably be affected by the management decisions that lead to Unity.
Mourning the state of PlayStation
Whether it is fair or not, Unity has become synonymous with the pitfalls of the PlayStation Live Service Pivot. Sony has shut down companies like Japan Studio and London Studio while seemingly devoting large portions of its resources to live service games like this one. Recently canceled a service game based on The Last of Us, Job cuts at Bungieand it seems to have been simply impossible to get the PS5 era of first-party games going. While Astro Bot is out this week on September 6th, PlayStation is looking bleak at the moment in terms of the quality of first-party games. It leaves people wistful for games like Gravity Rushwhich may not have been a big seller like The Last of Us or God of Warbut was definitely more memorable than a live service game that crashes and dies within a few days.
Could this have been prevented, or was this always Unity‘s fate?
There are many reasons Unity ended like this. The game was controversial on some fronts, even when it was first shown at State of Play in May. It’s a leap into a crowded genre where games like Overwatch2 And Apex Legends dominate. It cost $40 instead of being free-to-play like some of its competitors. But overall, it lacked that certain character-driven spark you need to get people to play a hero shooter. It’s not enough to be mechanically good if people aren’t attracted to the heroes they’re playing. PlayStation and Firewalk were obviously hoping Unity could become as ubiquitous as its contemporaries, but has missed its internal metrics so significantly that it is no longer seen two weeks after its launch.
Unity was misguided, but considering the market it was entering, it would have been difficult for even a much better game to penetrate the cultural consciousness, let alone one so generic that it is often only described in comparison to other works.
Is there hope?
Officially, Sony and Firewalk Studios are planning Unity back at some point. I think most people probably thought the game would be free-to-play to get rid of the $40 barricade between the shooter and its potential player pool. That seems like a reasonable way to go, and would certainly be more sensible than throwing years of work and millions of dollars down a well. But we’ve also seen games like The looter shooter from BioWare anthem Retreating for a retooling, only to end up dying anyway. How many more live service failures and missteps do we have to see in this industry before the suits realize that this is not sustainable? I am more interested in the human cost of this failure, so I hope Unity gets a second chance at life and has a better chance of success. The PlayStation fan in me hopes that if everything falls apart anyway, someone at Sony will realise that things can’t go on like this and is in the process of turning things around.
