An unannounced live service Twisted Metal game has been canceled according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. This report comes just hours after the news that PlayStation is laying off around 900 employees in its global studios. The unannounced game was in development at Firesprite, which has done quite a bit of recent work in VR titles like Horizon: Call of the Mountain and The Persistence.
While it seems like 2024 would be a great time to release a new Twisted Metal game off the back of the Peacock series that premiered last year, Schreier says that the canceled game wasn’t very far into its development cycle at all. In fact, it had not yet been greenlit for full development. There is always a chance that there is another studio working on a Twisted Metal game, but there has been no discussion of that. At the moment, it appears that the series is still dormant from a video game release standpoint.
This isn’t the only game to get the axe. The head of PlayStation Studios, Hermen Hulst, says that accompanying the announced layoffs today is news that various games across many studios have been reevaluated and canceled. No other projects have been brought up yet, but there is a chance those leaks can start appearing in the near future. Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Factions live service game was also recently canceled, so who knows how many other games of this nature have been canned.
The last Twisted Metal game to be released was in 2012 for the PlayStation 3. With the recent success of the Peacock series, it is hard not to look at news of a potential new entry being canceled as a disappointment. Just more mounting bad news alongside the thousands of layoffs in the industry.
