Tencent spent six years and hundreds of millions on a GTA competitor – the game Last Sentinel was shut down

Last Sentinel got a flashy cinematic reveal at The Game Awards 2023, positioned as an open-world sci-fi action game from former Rockstar Games developers.

Three years later, without ever showing gameplay, the title has apparently been shelved. According to Bloomberg, the game backer, Chinese giant Tencent, ultimately decided not to continue development in its current form after a recent production review.

The game was meant to rival Grand Theft Auto, but now it has been sent into deep freeze. New titles fall short of expectations all the time, but Last Sentinel was hardly a modest undertaking. Studio Lightspeed LA handled development, and according to Bloomberg, production started six years ago and already cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

When a playtest earlier this year flopped, Lightspeed got one last chance to improve the quality of the game. Bloomberg reports that the verdict from the final review came in earlier this week, with Tencent deciding not to continue work on the title. This led to the previously reported mass layoff of 80 developers from the studio.

What went wrong? Bloomberg mentions a lack of clear direction, vision, and competent management, including from development head Steve Martin, a 14-year Rockstar Games veteran who previously ran the company office in San Diego.

The whole endeavor also sounded overly ambitious for a brand-new studio trying to build a GTA-quality cyberpunk open world with a team of just a few hundred people. Whatever the ultimate reasons for the stalled development, the title reportedly blew past its budgets and deadlines. Tencent eventually decided to shut down the effort, pulling back from the AAA space.

Lightspeed LA continues to operate and make games

A representative also hinted that some version of the title is still in development. The apparent failure of Last Sentinel comes just months after Tencent announced the closure of TiMi Montreal, another studio it had funded for years but which never shipped anything.

TiMi Los Angeles studio Team Kaiju, which brought on former leads from Halo and Battlefield, shut down back in 2023. Several titles born during the pandemic-era gaming boom have quietly disappeared or crashed loudly.

MindsEye was also pitched as a potential GTA rival. Instead, it became the worst-reviewed game of 2025 and got caught up in scandals over alleged surveillance of its own employees.