Despite its best efforts, PlayStation’s live-service strategy hasn’t borne the fruits it has hoped for thus far.
The company’s initial plan was to charge head-first into the market with 12 games planned to be released within just a few years after making its biggest purchase in Bungie to help guide that effort. Ever since that declaration, PlayStation has been scaling back its grand plans piece by piece, with the latest news coming from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier revealing that two unannounced live-service projects in development and Bluepoint and Sony Bend have been canceled. We don’t know what the repercussions of this will be in terms of layoffs, but a spokesperson did confirm that neither studio would close down.
There’s no doubt PlayStation’s new leadership team took a much harder look at its live-service strategy after the unmitigated disaster that was Concord. It isn’t going to abandon this effort in full, but I believe that we’re seeing signs that it is ready to make painful choices now for the long-term health of its brand and studios. Only time will tell if they end up being the correct ones.
Pick your shots
A game cancellation is hardly ever good news. Video games are works of art, passion, and selfless dedication from teams large and small that all make major sacrifices to bring to life. It would be ignorant of the developer’s time and effort to celebrate a game’s cancellation for any reason, least of all because it isn’t something we personally wanted. Based on Schreier’s report, Bluepoint and Sony Bend each spent years on these projects and will now have to start from scratch on new developments with nothing to show for that time.
It feels as though PlayStation sees that as the lesser of two evils. It has seen just how catastrophic a failed — not bad — live service game can be and has raised its standards for which projects it feels are worth seeing through to release versus taking a short-term loss on canceling the others.
It hurts to lose years of hard work on a project people care deeply about; it hurts more for an entire studio to be shuttered after a catastrophic failure.
This move is a sad but necessary growing pain in PlayStation’s new live-service plans that is distinct from Naughty Dog ending development on The Last of Us Online. That was a studio choosing its own destiny, while these cancellations appear to have come from the top down. We might never know the full story behind Concord‘s development, but we can see the ramifications of it. That one fumble — as massive as it was — cast a shadow of doubt over every PlayStation live-service project both internally and externally.
Despite being completely independent projects, many associate all PlayStation games with one another. A great game from one studio raises expectations for the next, and a bomb will cause people to think twice. While that isn’t fair to each individual team and project, PlayStation has spent over a decade building a reputation as a company that creates games of the highest quality. All it takes is one misstep to shake consumer confidence, which can be notoriously fickle to recapture.
While circumstantial, one could read this situation as a positive sign for games like Fairgames and Marathon. It is possible we’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop, or perhaps they are simply too close to completion to cancel, but if PlayStation is indeed ready to drop projects it isn’t confident in then there is an implication that it does for those still standing. Of course, all this is still in flux as PlayStation as a whole struggles to communicate a clear direction heading into 2025.
PlayStation itself hasn’t updated us much on any major changes to its live-service push besides the fact that it is still a core focus alongside single-player games, as CEO Herman Hulst told Famitsu in December. It is still chasing a trend and, as a result, studios are suffering for it. I can only say that the silver lining to it all is that PlayStation at least appears to be learning and cutting losses before they become too great and entire studios are at risk. These are lessons it is taking not just from its own mistakes, but what it means to make a live-service game in the current climate as a whole. While it isn’t a route I personally am invested in, I can’t deny that it is something PlayStation sees as essential to survive as a business.
If the best we can hope for is a less ruthless and all-in mentality that is less of a risk for the fate of PlayStation’s studios, it is at least a step in the right direction.
