Gabriel Stanford-ReisingerNaughty Dog co-founder Andrew Gavin addressed one of the weirdly common questions surrounding the studio — why sell to Sony? Naturally, it circles back to budgets and the studio’s finances at the time.
On LinkedIn (spotted by Tech4Gamers), Gavin lamented about how budgets skyrocketed, with 80s games eating up around $50K before ballooning to the tune of $15 million, as was the case for among the studio’s more famed IPs, Jak and Daxter. Frankly, financial security is about the most clear reason as we could expect.
Naughty Dog could float a couple grand or even a couple hundred grand, but once it breaches the millions, yeah, that’s too much for the studio to recoup in the 2000s.
While the overall sale price has remained a mystery, Sony supposedly spent anywhere from $50 to $200 million in 2001 to acquire the dev, which has since become among the Japanese console maker’s biggest studios. While it remains keeping up with The Last of Us, it does have Intergalactic coming, marking its first new IP since 2013.