This kinda feels like Sony forced this to happen. I have no supporting evidence, it just feels like it to me.
You’d be right on the money imo.
I’ve been a AAA developer for almost 2 decades, and there is no way in hell they did not explicitly sign to have the sony account linking. I didn’t like the way he acted on twitter acting like the poor indy dev getting wrecked by the tyrant, when he was hoping it would fly.
He thought it would be okay to sell your data for his chance at making a game. When it backfired due to popularity, he didn’t take any responsibility and let sony look bad. I bet there’s a lot of people at Sony who didn’t like that.
I agree, he made his bigger partner look bad. Even if sony didn’t force this (which I’d be surprised about), their own board probably did. “Oh you just pissed off our biggest partner, that doesn’t seem great for business”
Arrowhead is a very small company. Company details are actually public knowledge in Sweden, and you can see that arrowhead only has 4 board members, two of them being the CEO and vice CEO: https://www.allabolag.se/5567796544/befattningar
Crunchbase seems to think they don’t have any venture capital, so it’s possible that the board members are the only shareholders here, but who knows.
Pretty cool. Nice to see someone so passionate about their studio that they stepped down to be in a more creative role.
There’s something to be said for knowing when you’re in the wrong role and fixing it rather than doubling down.