Gnomageddon Would Have Launched This Year
A PS4 exclusive called ‘Gnomageddon’ was reportedly in the works for three years but was eventually canned by Sony, a new report from Unseen64 reveals.
It was being developed by Sony San Diego (SSD), known for their work on MLB The Show as well as NBA ports on PSP, and was conceived from a PlayStation game jam. Typically, game jam concepts rarely amount to anything, but apparently, SSD felt like they had something special on its hands. It was to be a free-to-play class-based MOBA featuring garden gnomes duelling it out in the backyards of suburban United States. Gnomageddon sounded similar to PopCap’s Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare and that it would include a deathmatch mode and six different classes for gnomes. Progress on the game reached a point where the studio felt comfortable filing a trademark for the name and even made plans for a 2017 full release.
So what exactly happened to ‘Gnomageddon’ and why did Sony have second thoughts? Well, SSD was essentially broken into two separate teams: one team was working on KIll Strain, another free-to-play shooter that some may recognize launching in Summer 2016. Development on Kill Strain eventually took priority over Gnomageddon and naturally some of the developers on Gnomageddon were tasked to help with Kill Strain at a point when it needed a new direction. In the end, Kill Strain didn’t meet expectations; in fact, it ended up costing the studio a lot of money. A year later, Sony shut down Kill Strain’s servers due to poor player engagement. According to Unseen64, former developers of SSD blame Sony for Kill Strain’s lacking performance and for not marketing the game as well as they should have.
Sony lost faith in SSD and chose to lay off the portion of the studio that had made Kill Strain and was working on Gnomageddon. As stated earlier, SSD is still alive and works mainly on the excellent MLB The Show series. The video from Unseen64 is definitely recommended viewing, showing the development challenges of both SSD’s projects. Please give it a watch and let us know what your thoughts on the cancellation in the comments below.