Sony's September State of Play Disappoints With Major No-Shows Including Naughty Dog's Intergalactic

Sony held its September State of Play showcase on Thursday, and what was not there mattered as much as what was. Naughty Dog's Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet did not appear. God of War: Laufey stayed hidden. Horizon Hunters Gathering, Fairgames, and any meaningful update on Bungie's Marathon all remained absent—a string of no-shows that left fans who had gathered expecting major reveals walking away empty-handed.

The disappointment stung partly because the signals had seemed promising. Naughty Dog had broken weeks of silence just days before the event to announce that it had completed performance capture work on Intergalactic. That statement, in retrospect, reads less like the prelude to a big reveal and more like a courtesy notice that nothing else was coming. The studio has not shipped an original game since The Last of Us 2 in 2020. Since then, it has worked on remakes and abandoned a multiplayer spinoff. Intergalactic is now less than six months from release, yet Sony chose not to use its platform to show it.

God of War: Laufey seemed like a safer bet. Sony had devoted considerable airtime to the project during a July showcase, making a September appearance feel inevitable. But the studio opted to hold back. The Horizon spinoff, Hunters Gathering, also did not materialize—a decision that aligns with reporting from Bloomberg suggesting Sony had grown unhappy with how the game played during public testing. The project has since shifted away from a live-service model toward a cooperative experience with a story campaign, a pivot that may have required more development time before showing it publicly.

The silence extends far beyond these two titles. Media Molecule, the studio behind Dreams, has not released a game in six years. Sony Bend, which made Days Gone, has gone seven years without shipping anything new. Fairgames, a live-service heist game built by Haven Studios and helmed by Jade Raymond, has been invisible for years. Raymond, who co-created Assassin's Creed and previously led Star Wars: Battlefront 2 at EA in 2017, departed Haven last year. The game's creative director followed her out the door months later. What Fairgames even is at this point remains unclear.

Then there is Bungie and Marathon. The studio that built Destiny spent a decade developing that franchise before shutting down its sequel and laying off hundreds of staff. Marathon, the new project meant to chart a different course, has seen its player numbers decline steadily. The question hanging over it is not when it will get its next big update, but whether Sony will continue supporting it at all. Meanwhile, players have not stopped asking for Destiny 3.

Yet the timing of Sony's showcase may matter less than it seems. Grand Theft Auto 6 launches in two months, and Rockstar's marketing is already emphasizing that the game plays best on PlayStation 5. That single release will likely eclipse anything Sony's own studios could announce right now. The company's first-party pipeline is clearly thinner than fans hoped, but with the year's biggest game arriving with a PlayStation stamp on it, Sony may have calculated that September was not the moment to make its stand.