While studio acquisitions have become more and more common in recent years, Naughty Dog has been under the Sony banner for well over two decades now, delivering a lot of great titles to PlayStation consoles such as the Uncharted games, The Last of Us and its sequel, as well as the upcoming Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
Andrew Gavin, the co-founder of Naughty Dog, may have left the studio in 2004, but he was a big part in selling it to Sony. In a post on LinkedIn (via Gameranx), Gavin explained the decision-making process behind selling to Sony, and how it was the “right call.”
“When we started Naughty Dog in the 1980s, game development expenses were manageable. We bootstrapped everything, pouring profits from one game into the next,” he wrote. “By 2004, the cost of AAA games like Jak 3 had soared to $45-50 million — and they have been rising ever since. But back in 2000, we were still self-funding every project, and the stress of financing these ballooning budgets independently was enormous.”
Not wanting to give publishers too much leverage, Gavin made the decision to sell to Sony. “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 paralyzing fear that one slip would ruin it all.”
Even at big companies like Sony, massive budgets can lead to developer downfalls. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was one of the most-expensive games put out by the studio, with a lot of pressure being put on it to get that money back. And, there’s the obvious dead horse of Concord, which caused Firewalk Studio’s untimely demise. So, even if in the early 2000s, it was the right call to sell to a massive platform owner, in 2025 and beyond, even such titanic companies don’t guarantee you’ll get another shot with a huge AAA budget.