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The PS Plus August 2025 Extra and Premium games are now available to play, although there are staggered releases up until September for some regions. While there are fantastic games included such as Marvel’s Spider-Man, Mortal Kombat 1, and the relaxing Coral Island, Sword of the Sea is perhaps the best as a day-one release. It has received fantastic reviews with an aggregate of 89 on Metacritic, and the Sword of the Sea director has said that PlayStation “saved us” and that the PS Plus release was a worthy “trade-off” for getting the game out the door.
PlayStation “saved” Sword of the Sea
Sword of the Sea game director, Matt Nava, recently conducted an interview with Skill Up. During this interview, Matt Nava was asked how Giant Squid are fairing the storm of the current climate in the games industry that is seeing mass layoffs and furloughs at both big AAA and small indie studios.
Matt Nava said, “We’re doing okay, somehow,” while admitting it has been “rocky for sure” with “moments where we’re [Giant Squid] like are we gonna make it”. Fortunately, the developer had some “really fantastic partners over at the PlayStation Indies program who believed in this project from the very beginning and when times got tough, they came in and saved us”.
The director added, “It was really down to a couple individuals over there who decided it [Sword of the Sea] was worth fighting for to keep this project alive,” and Giant Squid are “incredibly grateful to those people over there”.
Regarding the game releasing day-one on PS Plus, Nava said it played into “how we survived”. The director shared that the studio’s intention was to be independent without a publisher after shipping The Pathless. However, “halfway through development [for Sword of the Sea], everything went crazy and there was kind of a moment where we didn’t know if we were going to be able to fund the rest of development and we had to go back to the well and kind of say, ‘Hey, Sony, can you help us?’”.
The director revealed that the “PlayStation Plus department and the PlayStation Indies department collaborated in order to kind of do some internal deals and make sure that we could get this thing out”.
Lastly, the director said, “It’s a little bit odd that we’re going to be on there [PS Plus] day one… it’s a trade-off because if you’re on there Sony’s going to push your game more… [and] the fact that we’re on there is really why the reason why this game was able to make it out the door”.
In other PlayStation news, leaks have revealed PS5 ports for Halo.
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