Normally I personally don’t copy/paste texts, but this isn’t a news site, it’s a social media post made to the public. Feels different to me. Here’s Gavin’s post:

Why did we sell Naughty Dog?

It’s a question I’ve been asked countless times. The answer is simple: budgets were skyrocketing.

When we started Naughty Dog in the 1980s, game development expenses were manageable. We bootstrapped everything, pouring profits from one game into the next.

• Our early 80s games cost less than $50,000 each to make.

• Rings of Power ('88-91), saw budgets rise to about $100,000, but yielded slightly more than that in after tax profits in 1992.

• In 1993, we rolled that $100k from Rings into a self funded Way of the Warrior.

• But Crash Bandicoot ('94-96) cost $1.6 million to make.

• By the time we got to Jak and Daxter ('99-01), the budget busted the $15 million mark.

By 2004, the cost of AAA games like Jak 3 had soared to $45-50 million – and they have been rising ever since.

But back in 2000, we were still self-funding every project, and the stress of financing these ballooning budgets independently was enormous.

It wasn’t just us. This was (and still is) a systemic issue in the AAA space. Developers almost never have the resources to fund their own games, which gives publishers enormous leverage.

Selling to Sony wasn’t just about securing a financial future for Naughty Dog. It was about giving the studio the resources to keep making the best games possible, without being crushed by the weight of skyrocketing costs and the paralyzing fear that one slip would ruin it all.

Looking back, it was the right call.

AAA games have only gotten more expensive since then. Today’s big budget games can easily cost $300, $400, or even $500 million to develop.

Would we have been able to keep up? Maybe. But selling – to the right party – gave Naughty Dog the stability it needed to thrive — and to continue making the kinds of games we’d always dreamed of!