Naughty Dog was sold to Sony because the "stress of ballooning budgets was enormous" says co-founder
"Looking back, it was the right call."
Naughty Dog co-founder Andrew Gavin has opened up about why the studio was acquired by Sony back in 2001.
In a lengthy post on LinkedIn, Gavin cited the spiralling costs of game development as one of the reasons the studio was sold, saying "a systemic issue in the AAA space" wherein developers "almost never have the resources to fund their own games [...] gives publishers enormous leverage".
"Why did we sell Naughty Dog? It's a question I've been asked countless times. The answer is simple: budgets were skyrocketing," Gavin - who worked at Naughty Dog for almost 20 years before leaving in 2004 - said (via Gameranx).
"When we started Naughty Dog in the 1980s, game development expenses were manageable. We bootstrapped everything, pouring profits from one game into the next. Our early 80s games cost less than $50,000 each to make. Rings of Power ('88-91), saw budgets rise to about $100,000, but yielded slightly more than that in after tax profits in 1992.
"In 1993, we rolled that $100k from Rings into a self-funded Way of the Warrior. But Crash Bandicoot ('94-96) cost $1.6 million to make. By the time we got to Jak and Daxter ('99-01), the budget busted the $15 million mark.
"By 2004, the cost of AAA games like Jak 3 had soared to $45-50 million - and they have been rising ever since," Gavin added. "But back in 2000, we were still self-funding every project, and the stress of financing these ballooning budgets independently was enormous.
"It wasn't just us. This was (and still is) a systemic issue in the AAA space. Developers almost never have the resources to fund their own games, which gives publishers enormous leverage. Selling to Sony wasn't just about securing a financial future for Naughty Dog. It was about giving the studio the resources to keep making the best games possible, without being crushed by the weight of skyrocketing costs and the paralysing fear that one slip would ruin it all.
"Looking back, it was the right call."
Gavin ended by admitting that "AAA games have only gotten more expensive since then", citing costs for today's big-budget games "easily" top "$300, $400, or even $500 million".
"Would we have been able to keep up? Maybe. But selling - to the right party - gave Naughty Dog the stability it needed to thrive and to continue making the kinds of games we'd always dreamed of!"
Several months after studio lead Neil Druckmann confirmed Naughty Dog had a number of games in the works, the team has lifted the lid on its next, all-new title: Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet for PS5.
"Set thousands of years in the future, Intergalactic puts players into the role of Jordan A. Mun, a dangerous bounty hunter who ends up stranded on Sempiria – a distant planet whose communication with the outside universe went dark hundreds of years ago," teases the blurb.
"Jordan will have to use all her skills and wits if she hopes to be the first person in over 600 years to leave its orbit," reads the game's official blurb."