LogInThe decision, according to Andrew Gavin, gave the studio the stability it needed to thrive.
Andrew Gavin, a legendary Game Developer and Co-Founder of Naughty Dog, who departed the studio two decades ago this year, has recently taken to LinkedIn to finally address one of the gaming community's most burning questions, revealing the exact reason why the studio chose to join Sony in 2001, despite performing well enough independently.
Sony
As Gavin revealed, the reason behind the studio's sale is fairly simple and, apparently, is not related to Naughty Dog picking PlayStation "as the winner in the last generation of consoles," as he had stated back in 2001. At the time, game production budgets were soaring year after year, with the studio spending $50,000 on its earliest games, Rings of Power doubling that figure, Crash Bandicoot costing a whopping $1.6 million, and Jak and Daxter raising the budget to $15 million, an astonishing number at the time.
With costs rising dramatically with each new release, the stress caused by the need to self-fund every project became unbearable, which, according to the developer, was a systemic issue in the AAA space at the time, where developers rarely had the resources to fund their own games, giving publishers significant leverage. Sony's acquisition of Naughty Dog allowed the developer to secure its financial future and provided the resources necessary to make the games they wanted, "without being crushed by the weight of skyrocketing costs and the paralyzing fear that one slip would ruin it all."
"Looking back, it was the right call," Gavin said. "AAA games have only gotten more expensive since then. Today's big-budget games can easily cost $300, $400, or even $500 million to develop. 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!"
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