Tencent Reportedly Spent Six Years And Hundreds Of Millions Trying To Turn Last Sentinel Into A Grand Theft Auto Competitor And Failed

Last Sentinel received a glossy, cinematic reveal at the 2023 Game Awards, billing itself as a sci-fi open-world action game from former Rockstar Games developers. Three years later, without ever showing off gameplay, it appears to have effectively been abandoned. Bloomberg reports that the game’s backer, Chinese conglomerate Tencent, ultimately decided not to move forward with the project as it stands after a recent development review. It was supposed to be a Grand Theft Auto competitor and now it sounds like it’s going to end up vaporware. New games fail to live up to the hype all of the time, but Last Sentinel was no small endeavor. It was being made by Lightspeed LA, and Bloomberg reports that production began six years ago and had already cost hundreds of millions. When a playtest earlier this year reportedly bombed, Lightspeed was given one last chance to improve the quality of the game. The verdict of the final review came back earlier this week, according to Bloomberg, with Tencent reportedly deciding not to move forward with the game, leading to the previously reported mass layoff of 80 developers from the studio. So where did things go wrong? Bloomberg‘s report cited a lack of clear direction, vision, and good management, including on the part of project head Steve Martin, a 14-year veteran of Rockstar Games who previously managed its San Diego office. The project also sounded overly ambitious for a brand new studio attempting a GTA-quality cyberpunk open-world with a team size of just a few hundred. Whatever the ultimate reasons for the game’s stalled development, it reportedly blew through budgets and deadlines, and Tencent ultimately decided to pull the plug as it pivots away from AAA gaming. “Lightspeed LA remains open and continues to build games,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg, and suggested some version of the project is still going forward. The apparent failure of Last Sentinel comes several months after Tencent announced the closure of TiMi Montreal, another game studio it funded for years without ever shipping anything. TiMi’s L.A.-based studio, Team Kaiju, which attracted former leads from Halo and Battlefield, ended up shutting down back in 2023. A number of projects that were incubated back around the pandemic-era boom in gaming have quietly disappeared or failed spectacularly. MindsEye was also pitched as a potential rival to GTA. Instead, it became the worst-rated game of 2025 and was embroiled in controversies about allegedly spying on its employees.