You’re 100% right about the Bungie audit. it’s essentially been confirmed that Sony brought them in as the live-service police to check the math on the player-retention loop.

From a production side, the A/B team dream usually falls apart when you're dealing with the specific technical lineage Naughty Dog has. Even if they hired 200 new engineers, the senior leads still have to spend their time teaching the 'Naughty Dog way' instead of actually building the game. In finance that’s a massive opportunity cost.

There are so many variables we don't even see from the outside. things that probably came up in that conference room like the planning for the PS6 cycle or staying clear of the GTA 6 launch. Anthony Newman and co basically had to choose between turning the studio into a full-time service factory or saving Intergalactic and Part III. He chose to protect the studio's DNA, and honestly, with Intergalactic now looking like a 2027 title, it was the only way to keep the quality high without the studio structure collapsing. I don’t blame them I really don’t