In case you hadn’t heard the big news of the day: Sony and developer Firewalk Studios are closing Treatythe non-Guardians of the Universe hero shooter who has been flopping hard since its launch on August 23. The studio appears to be planning a comeback of sorts, as the announcement says the shutdown will take place on September 6 so the team can “explore options” on what to do next. In the meantime, anyone who purchased the game is eligible for a full refund.

Whether you like it Treaty or not, this should hit you hard. Sony and Firewalk poured a lot of time and money into this game as part of their big live-service push, and it’s a flop so hard that Sony is pulling the plug on it before it can even reach its one-month anniversary. Somewhere in the PlayStation corporate meetings, Sony was willing to invest heavily in the game, and an expanded universe has been spun off from it. There’s even an episode based on the game in Amazon’s upcoming anthology series Secret Level coming in decemberThat episode may be the final gasp for a game that was shut down in just two weeks.

How did we get here? People have a lot of theories, and the implications for PlayStation and the state of the video game industry in general aren’t pretty. Let’s take a look at some of the internet’s reactions to the (seemingly temporary) death of Treaty.

Sympathy for the developers

Many people who have worked in corporate jobs, especially in creative industries, know the pain of having big business make decisions that inevitably lead to the slow decline of something people love. As the public has become more aware of the working conditions in the video game industry, the natural tendency for some people to worry about the designers, artists, and programmers who are inevitably affected by the management decisions that led to Treaty.

Crying about the state of PlayStation

Whether it’s fair or not, Treaty has become synonymous with the pitfalls of PlayStation live service pivot point. Sony has been shuttering companies like Japan Studio and London Studio while seemingly devoting large chunks of its resources to live-service games like these. It recently a service game cancelled on the basis of The last of us, Bungie is cutting jobsand it seems like it’s just been an impossible task to get the PS5 era of first-party games off the ground. While Astro bot is coming out this week on September 6th, things are looking bleak for PlayStation right now in terms of quality first-party games. It makes people long for games like Gravity Rushwhich may not have been as big a seller as The last of us or God of warbut was certainly more memorable than a live service game that crashes and burns within days.

Could this have been prevented, or was this always the case? Treaty‘s fate?

There are many reasons Treaty turned out that way. The game was divided on a few fronts, even when it was first shown at State of Play in May. It jumps into a crowded genre that includes games like Overwatch2 And Apex Legends dominate. It had a $40 price tag instead of being free to play like several competitors. But overall it lacked that certain character-driven spark you need to get people playing a hero shooter. It’s not enough to be mechanically good if people aren’t drawn to the heroes they’re playing. PlayStation and Firewalk clearly hoped Treaty could have become as ubiquitous as its contemporaries, but it failed so badly to meet internal goals that it went offline two weeks after launch.

Treaty was misguided, but given the market it was entering, it would have been difficult for even a much better game to penetrate the cultural consciousness, let alone one so generic that it is often only described in comparison to other works.

Is there hope?

Officially, Sony and Firewalk Studios are planning to Treaty back at some point. I think most people probably thought the game would go free-to-play to remove the $40 barrier between the shooter and its potential player pool. That seems like a reasonable path forward, and would certainly be more sensible than dumping years of work and millions of dollars down a drain. But we’ve also seen games like BioWare’s looter shooter National Anthem pull out for a retooling, only to die anyway. How many more live service failures and missteps do we have to see this industry make before the suits realize this is not sustainable? I care more about the human cost of this failure, so I hope Treaty gets a second chance at life in a better position for success. The PlayStation fan in me hopes that if it all falls apart anyway, someone at Sony realizes that this can’t go on and gets the ship back on track right now.