Tencent pulls backing from GTA rival Last Sentinel after layoffs and failed playtests

Tencent has walked away from Last Sentinel, the cyberpunk open-world game developed by its LA-based studio Lightspeed Entertainment, after the project failed to impress in internal playtests and a demo shown to Tencent executives earlier this year. The fallout has cost 80 people their jobs.

According to Bloomberg, Last Sentinel had been in development for six years — announced at The Game Awards in 2023 — and was pitched as a GTA-style open world set in a vertical cyberpunk city in Japan, with destructible environments and the usual mix of driving and shooting. But the project ran into serious structural problems: the team was significantly smaller than what Rockstar assembled for its modern open worlds, and anonymous sources inside Lightspeed describe an unclear creative vision compounded by a "polarizing" management style from former Rockstar San Diego studio director Steve Martin. After a poor playtest and a weak showing for Tencent brass, the studio scrambled to put together a better build — but it wasn't enough to keep the publisher on board.

Last Sentinel isn't officially cancelled. Lightspeed says it's continuing development without Tencent's funding and plans to "shift the creative and development direction" of the game to better meet player expectations. That's a tall order: the game spent years being positioned as a high-budget GTA competitor, and suspicions about its state had already been growing after promotional videos released last year showed zero actual gameplay footage.

With 80 staff gone, Tencent out, and a creative reset on the table, Last Sentinel faces an uphill climb. Whether Lightspeed can salvage something meaningful from six years of troubled development — and what that something would even look like — remains an open question.