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Andrew Gavin, co-founder and developer of Uncharted Naughty dogexplained in a lengthy post on LinkedIn why the studio was sold to Sony nearly 25 years ago.
While leaving Naughty Dog in 2004, Gavin worked at the creator of Crash Bandicoot for nearly 20 years, and explained that he was often asked why he sold the company. In short, it was due to the high costs of game development.
Why did we sell Naughty Dog? It’s a question I’ve been asked countless times. The answer is simple: budgets have increased dramatically.
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When we started Naughty Dog in the 1980s, game development expenses were manageable. We smoothed everything out, pouring profits from one game to the next. The cost of creating our games in the early 1980s was less than $50,000 each. Rings of Power (’88-91) saw budgets rise to around $100,000, but made slightly more than that in after-tax profits in 1992.
In 1993, we transferred $100,000 from Rings to the self-funded Warrior Way. But Crash Bandicoot (94-96) cost $1.6 million to make. By the time we got to Jak and Daxter (’99-01), the budget had passed the $15 million mark. By 2004, the cost of AAA games such as Such as 3 It rose to $45 to $50 million – and has been rising ever since. But in 2000, we were still self-financing every project, and the pressures of independently financing such bloated budgets were enormous.
Naughty Dog had great success while under the Sony umbrella, spearheading franchises like Jak & Daxter, Uncharted, and The Last of Us. Her latest project is titled Intergalactic: Heretic Prophetannounced during the Game Awards in December 2024.
