The creative director and writer of Days Gone, John Garvin, spoke with game designer David Jaffe on Jaffe's YouTube Show (and transcribed by VideoGamesChronicle) to discuss the 2019 action-adventure survival horror game, Days Gone, by Sony's Bend Studio.
Garvin said that if you like a game you should buy it at full price and that if you don't do that you shouldn't complain if it doesn't get a sequel.
"I do have an opinion on something that your audience may find of interest, and it might piss some of them off," said Garvin. "If you love a game, buy it at f***ing full price. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen gamers say 'yeah, I got that on sale, I got it through PS Plus, whatever.'"
Jaffe responded by asked, "But how do you know you love a game until you’ve played it?"
Garvin replied by saying, "I’m just saying, you don’t, but don’t complain if a game doesn’t get a sequel if it wasn’t supported at launch. It’s like, God of War got whatever number millions of sales at launch and, you know, Days Gone didn’t. [I’m] just speaking for me personally as a developer, I don’t work for Sony, I don’t know what the numbers are.
"I can tell you that when we were doing [Syphon Filter] Dark Mirror [on PSP], we got so f***ed on Dark Mirror because piracy was a thing and Sony wasn’t really caught up on what piracy was doing to sales.
"And we would show them torrents, a torrent site had 200,000 copies of Dark Mirror being downloaded. If I remember it right, the numbers could be wrong, but regardless, I was pissed about it then, I was like 'this is money out of my pocket.'
"So I think the uptick in engagement with the game is not as important as, did you buy the game at full price? Because if you did, then that’s supporting the developers directly."
Garvin added that the reason he left Sony's Bend Studio was due to his personality and not due to the performance of Days Gone.
"It was a hard, long development, six years, and I worked six years of crunch. And here’s the thing, I love working crunch. […] I love what I do so it’s not that big a deal, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for me. So the last two years I’ve actually been away from the studio have actually been a blessing. I have been able to get up and do what I want, I’ve written three books, and it’s just a different thing.
"When you’re in development it’s a non-stop pressure with milestones, profitability and people management […] and to be honest, at the end of the day, what it really comes down to is, we had a few heated arguments over the last year or so, and I would end up yelling and saying something like 'just give me a package so I can get the f*** out of here,' some s**t like that.
"And when it was just Chris [Reese] and I in a very small studio, that kind of heatedness was fine, but by the time you get to a 100-person studio you can’t have one of the directors losing their temper, you know. And I’m not a great people person anyway, and it’s not like they didn’t try, I was put through training a couple of times, like ‘hey, here’s how you go out to lunch with people more, and be a better director’, and dude, I just kinda sucked at all that."
Former Sony Bend game director Jeff Ross had previously confirmed that the studio had been working on a pitch for Days Gone 2, however, due to an NDA with Sony he could not confirm or deny that it had been cancelled.
Ross, who is now working at Mortal Kombat developer NetherRealm, said he was working on a Days Gone 2 pitch, but ended up leaving the company due to personal reasons and it "had nothing to do with the status of the sequel." He did confirm parts of a recent report were true such as that parts of Sony Bend were assigned to work on Naughty Dog games.
Days Gone released for the PlayStation in April 2019 and will launch on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store on May 18 for $49.99.
by William D'Angelo