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If you talk to these people, they will tell you a story about a small Dutch developer who didn't understand anything, had a private, little game that they played internally. And that then Sony's money transformed from an amateur launch on the now disowned ps3, and turned it into a grand success with the subsequent Killzone games that no one have played.
In reality, Guerilla Games (like Arrowhead) was a small studio with a really, really good set of developers, who just jumped at the opportunity to program game-engine routines on the ps3 hardware (like they had done on the psp before that). And made a package that was flawless from start to finish, from the presentation to the graphics and the mechanics.
This game then launched to quite a lot of fanfare, actually, and was intended to be one of the titles that would sell the ps3. But the beta was filled with people (predominantly from the US market, to put it like that) who would struggle very hard to even aim in the game. And who just didn't understand the mechanics or how to move in it (even though the likeness to Halo is very obvious). But they managed to mobilize things like the guy at Digital Foundry, and made several hit-pieces that were complete balderdash.
And that then engaged the community team. Which ended up with a firing of the creative director at GG, and a new one inserted from Sony's own employees. Who then basically thundered through all the usual changes that you would also recognize from HD2: remove lag-protection, remove matching, remove aiming mechanics and replace them with twitch, nerf the AI, remove the AI routines not being predictable, cut out geometry functions, remove recoil on the weapons, add infinitely spinning numbers and level-ups, and so on.
The game went from about 50k players in a week to less than a 1000 in one week. But the Playstation team still used the Killzone universe from the trailers and so on (that were, at one point, generated in in-game engine footage). And kept using this as the "Halo killer" candidate. Because it was the best asset Sony had, basically. After all, there's no .. Call of Duty or Halo on Playstation, so why not just sell KZ?
But the game was ruined by these attempts to placate a very specific and narrow minority. Where, and stop me when you have heard this before, more turrets, more mechs, and finally even new hats were seriously suggested to be added to the game to make the game the success it deserved. It ended up with a new class, that essentially was a class geared to a specifically requested playing style. And it was a total bomb.
The subsequent Killzone games also veered off from the initial premise of "follow the bad guys to war", and just utterly stranded in some kind of "hero shooter 19" territory. But Sony have still kept on holding on to this game, and use it as one of the franchises it "owns". The former CEO of GG is also now the CEO of Sony, so that obviously would make something happen with the usual bum-kissing attempts Sony has in the nepo-producer ranks as well.
But fundamentally, the crossover is a brag about Sony's people "owning" the studio. And a celebration for how they perceive themselves in the community team and the producer wing: as an outfit that saves horrible games from disaster with their magical touches and advice.
Rather than what they actually are: a herd of mindless pelicans tapping their beaks at the developer's keyboards when they're programming.
But that's how delusional you can be when you have money, and presumably a parent in the board, who will intervene and stop anyone from firing you by throwing you out of the window.
In the end, they do manage to ruin good games, though. To which the answer will be: but without our help, the game would be even worse. Or, like I got in person: "you don't know what you're talking about". I do. But I don't have power to plaster my opinion on top of the pile, and then to keep doing that to subsequently more and more disastrous results for anything they touch.
Like.. there is a Halo warthog sequence in one of the Uncharted games. It just screams out as the most misplaced on rails shooting scene in the entire history of video-games. But it's there because someone wanted that "halo moment". I'm not kidding you here - one of the seriousest requests in the Uncharted 2 beta was to have karts in the game. Why? Because mario kart is popular. Therefore, karts should be there. I joked about it by calling it "Unkarted". But that was a serious suggestion. How would it be in there, how would it be part of the story - no one knows. Someone with pull still pushed that.
And if you are wondering how karts made their entry in GT6 - as the supposedly most requested feature.. (a feature that is the 100% least used update feature in any game, I'm sure - no one plays karts in Gran Turismo, ffs) -- then take a guess, knowing where these obsessions come from, and the ability of these people to push this through.
Polyphony, of course, ended up terminating their business-relationship with Sony after that game. And that was none of their business, of course. And surely had nothing to do with having been harassed to add crossovers and karts, while being extorted with how not doing that would put them on the ♥♥♥♥-list in terms of marketing.
This group - it's maybe 10 people at Sony - are completely insane. But they have pull, somehow, to just ignore the disasters that they're pushing through. These are the kinds of people who off-handedly pay tons of money to google to have their amateurish "video-game show" played on every game advert for 45 minutes, for months. They promote their channel on youtube, and get hits - and just unashamedly sell it as an asset to Sony.
And they get away with it, presumably because Hermen Hulst and anyone else on the board are just as clueless about the damage they've been doing since they alsmost buried Hulst's company when they made Killzone2.
But that was - in their minds - the same story. A small studio making psp-games and simple top-down stuff - being rescued by the magic of Sony. If you talk to these people now, I'm 100% sure they'll just wax poetically about the similarities between HD and KZ (which Pilestedt has pointed out as well - they were fans of KZ).
But without, of course, remembering that Sony utterly destroyed a genuinely good game with "community suggestions" and then subsequent patching that destroyed the game for good.
Like one of their developers said at the time "we didn't know that this is where the game would end up, so we never thought of taking backups of the original launch". No ♥♥♥♥ you didn't expect the publisher to destroy their own game with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, to the point were it's unmarketable poison.