Sony was cutting budgets for studios and projects

It’s not easy in the game business now, layoffs are being made, games are being canceled, and Sony is also gradually cutting back on its projects (Microsoft did it at the beginning of the year, when it laid off several studios). In particular, Sony seems to be cutting back on their upcoming Games as a Service, which they massively got into two years ago. We don’t know if it also affected single player games.

While we know about the changes in the titles and companies being developed:

• We know of at least two third-party companies affected by game cancellations. One is Deviation Games, which worked on the game with an investment of 50 million dollars, the other affected company was Final Strike Games. Both companies were already laying off workers.
• Sony has closed its smaller PixelOpus studio
• The Last of Us multiplayer team has been cut and the project is currently being reassessed
• They also just laid off at PlayStation Visual Arts, where they cut the team to a AAA multiplayer project (this may also be related to The Last of Us multiplayer, if the studio supported it)

As for PlayStation Visual Arts, the situation was clarified by one of the former employees who was fired. He says that the company’s budget has been cut and it has to be stuffed

We’ll see how all of Sony’s live games go, they’re developing dozens of them, and they’re probably counting that even more than half won’t be released, or won’t survive the first year. It is standard in this genre. Either people get hooked on the game or they don’t. The audience is limited and online players are hard to fight. Finally, they already tried it with Destruction AllStars.