After merely two weeks available on the market, Sony shut down Harmony and of that drip-fed data come ahead, we now know this recreation may need value $400 million to make. It additionally had a poisonous positivity drawback.
A anonymous staffer who labored on Harmony spoke with Sacred Symbols host, Colin Moriarty, in regards to the recreation’s downfall. This staffer famous the sport’s lavish finances and the tradition surrounding the sport and studio. General, blame was positioned on a “poisonous positivity” mindset the place you simply couldn’t unhealthy mouth the sport even when it was the “proper” factor to do due to “Bungie Magic,” as a great portion of the studio was made up of previous Bungie devs.
In 2023, the sport went into alpha the place it was described as being in a “laughable state,” at the moment, the sport was already $200 million down the drain, which means one other $200 million was tossed all year long. Taking into account, the sport was teased that very same 12 months that it entered alpha with a launch 12 months hooked up.
This “poisonous positivity” mindset wasn’t simply an alleged factor from one worker, both, because it’s additionally been backed by Kotaku’s Ethan Gach on Twitter. Moriarty does assert if that is true, Harmony was Sony’s greatest recreation budget-wise and thus is a quite large failure, as the sport not solely shut down its servers not lengthy after launch, however all gamers have been refunded.
Hopefully, this comes as a cautionary story for studios seeking to chase the most recent tendencies in gaming and makes studios notice trend-chasing nearly by no means ends nicely.