Although it’s widely known that Sony’s ventures into live-service games have mostly fallen short, with “Helldivers 2” being the lone exception. Nevertheless, Sony’s Chief Financial Officer, Lin Tao, addressed the criticism surrounding numerous unsuccessful projects at PlayStation Studios, expressing optimism that pursuing live service games remains a valuable endeavor for the company.
In the past year, Concord closed down, and Marathon was delayed, which has resulted in some less than positive announcements. However, if we reflect on the last five years, there were hardly any live service games from PlayStation Studios five years ago. Now, we have Helldivers 2, MLB The Show, Gran Turismo 7, and Bungie’s Destiny 2 providing a steady stream of sales and profits as part of our live service offerings.” (Tao’s statement, paraphrased during a Q&A session following Sony’s recent earnings call, as reported by VGC)
Tao points out that the limited number of live-service games Sony has released recently have made up nearly half of the PlayStation’s earnings in the current quarter. Over an entire year, their contribution seems to drop to between 20% and 30%. Yet, even from a long-term viewpoint, this is still a significant portion of the total revenue generated.
She mentioned that the live service ratio for Q1 was approximately 40%, but for the entire year it’s expected to be around 20-30%. This indicates that the transformation isn’t going completely smoothly at the moment, but if we look at the progress over five years, there has undeniably been a significant change.
Absolutely, we acknowledge that there are numerous challenges left to address. Let’s take the insights gained from our errors and strive for a smoother experience by incorporating live service content with minimal inefficiencies.
Tao’s errors might involve a few aborted ventures, such as the swift failure of the Concord project from last year, which is well-known for its brief existence. A report not long ago in January suggested another abandoned live-service project at Bend Studio, developers of Days Gone, had also been scrapped. The game was said to be in development for several years before it was ultimately cancelled.
Among the significant live service projects terminated by Sony are a multiplayer version of “The Last of Us,” a speculated revival of the “Twisted Metal” series, and an unnamed project from London Studio, none of which Sony has officially confirmed. However, rumors from earlier this year suggested that the failure of “Concord” may have contributed to the cancellation of these projects, although Sony has yet to comment on this matter directly.
According to Jeff Grubb from Giant Bomb in January, Sony has been significantly impacted by some event at Concord, and as a result, they are reviewing every project with all studios. If the project is intended to be live-service, there’s a lot of resistance against it, making it difficult for it to be released.
After leaving his position at PlayStation, Shuhei Yoshida expressed that if he were still with the company, he would advocate for a different approach to game development – one less focused on live-service games.
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2025-08-07 18:04