If there's an obvious problem with How Playstation Operates today, it's project management at the big prestige single player teams. Especially Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch, and Bend. We should know what these teams' next projects are. Those projects should be well along. It wouldn't be unreasonable to know what Santa Monica and Guerrilla are doing next, and they've had games released on PS5.
It doesn't mean they have a problem, it means you are impatient.
Their most recent games as usual were great and performed great, and the next ones -which will show when ready and once they consider it's the time- pretty likely too, as their previous titles. There's no issue with them.
At the publisher level at playstation, it's just lack of any cadence for 1st party releases. 2023 and 2024 are pretty soft. The generation as a whole is pretty soft considering some of the real magic-level games like Ragnarok and Forbidden West are fine on PS4. You can't stake an entire year on one october game multiple years in a row. We don't just need great games, we need some sense of a release schedule.
They released Spider-Man 2 a few months ago, a year where they also released PSVR2 with Horizon CoM, GT7 plus 3rd party stuff like Resident Evil and later move VR 1st party stuff Firewall Ultra and Ghostbusters. Plus obviosly MLB and the Destiny 2 expansion. That year they also released PS Portal, PS Slim, headsets etc.
They just released TLOU2R and Helldivers 2. In a month they release Rise of the Ronin and later MLB and Stellar Blade a month or two later. Soon after Destiny 2 The Final Shape. Then Until Dawn remake and Concord. There's also Convallaria and Lost Soul Aside plus more China Hero Project that should be somewhere this year. And obviously mixed with 3rd party exclusives like FFVII Rebirth and cool indies.
For next year so far we know minimum Marathon and Death Stranding 2 and who knows if (I doubt it) Fairgame$.
They had a 2023 and will have a 2024 packed of great 1st party stuff (+ hardware/accesory), great 3rd party exclusives and multis.
If you ignore it or are uninformed it's your issue, not theirs.
I agree with Sucker Punch, but Naughty Dog's next game is a new IP and the main project that was being worked on post TLoU Part II was Factions and we all know how that panned out.
ND started to work in a minimum two SP game months after releasing TLOU2 and other one early 2023 and none of these two are TLOU3.
Meaning, prettty likely they are either Uncharted, new IP or who knows if a Marvel IP or some other Sony IP (when asked in which stablished IP he'd like to work Druckmann listed Punisher as the top 1 followed by Half Life, Ghost Rider, Hotline Miami and Cowboy Bebop.
I assume that after canning TLOU Online, they'll reburbish as much as they can from it on TLOU3, which maybe they also started after canning TLOU Online.
Even worse with Bend, we actually know that it hasn't been that long since they got their pitch approved for their new IP when they decided they didn't want to do Days Gone 2.
Yes, they started to work on it pretty recently so won't share anything about it in a long period of time.
Santa Monica has a second team that has been working on Cory Barlog's project, I feel like we should be seeing this soon? If not, I got questions.
When they shipped GoW2018 Cory said he was going to take some long vacations with the family and after it was going to make a pitch for a new IP. Consider some months with prototypes, concept art and brainstorming stuff, sending the pitch and making some evaluations and checks.
If it got greenlight (I assume they did), they probably would have started to work on it arond early 2019. That's 5 years ago, so if it exist and stared it then and weren't busy with something else (GoWR) they should show it soon.
What we know for sure is that they released GoWR, GoWR Valhalla and now are working on a new IP set in a new mythology. Don't expect to see this one soon either.
Plus should be overviewing the GoW movie adapation.
Guerilla, well, if things were actually working out with the multiplayer game, we would've seen that game already.
But things don't look too hot right now.
Horizon 3 is obviously pretty far off.
They said they are working in both an Horizon MP game (they hired its director in 2018, so may show it soon) and a SP Horizon 3, which I assume they started to do after shipping HFW.
Plus should be overviewing the Horizon movie adaptation.