PlayStation Has Its Head In The Sand About Its Live Service Future

While fans wait for crumbs of new information about PlayStation games like Intergalactic or Wolverine, Sony is continuing to tout their current and future live service plans, saying that it is “very, very committed to building a diverse and a resilient live-service portfolio,” according to boss Herman Hulst.

This is in the wake of promises that PlayStation has learned lessons from the failure of Concord: “We have reviewed our processes in light of this to deeply understand how and why that title failed to meet expectations and to ensure we’re not going to make the same mistakes again,” Hulst said.

But looking at Sony’s plans in the plain light of day, and despite all this projected confidence, it very much feels like the company is burying its head in the sand when it comes to the reality of its situation. Of the games pictured on its live-service planning sheet, we can break most of them down in different ways:

Helldivers 2 – An unequivocal success story, one of the only ones Sony has had during this recent push, but something of a limited-time offer. Developer Arrowhead is not a Sony studio, and it has announced that because Helldivers 2 has done so well, that they are able to self-fund and publish their next game without Sony’s help at all. While they say it’s no shade to Sony, it reinforces that Arrowhead is not some sort of in-house live-service powerhouse they can rely on indefinitely, and they will be moving on.

Destiny 2 – The decade-spanning series is something of a miracle in the land of live services, and you can say it actually helped launch the entire trend. But in year 11, things are scaling way down in the post-Light and Darkness era. The game has gone from record highs to record lows as it moves toward a new “Frontiers” era, which will allow the game to subsist, but it is simply never going to reach previously high water marks from here. Sony will also not allow Bungie to put D2 to bed in order to take time to make a Destiny 3 that may never even get here as D2 shambles on past its expiration date.

Marathon – Herman Hulst made headlines calling the game “bold and innovative” and slides touting “strong engagement” about the game, but it’s just sandblasting away the enormous issues facing Marathon, a quadruple combo blow of 1) a poor gameplay showcase, 2) mixed-to-poor alpha feedback, 3) a headline-dominating art plagiarism scandal, 4) a post-alpha, post-plagiarism livestream that did little to reassure anyone on any front. Marathon is in deep trouble, and it will take something of a miracle for this game to land the way Sony wants it to as an industry hit.

Fairgames – The head of the studio, Jade Raymond, just left the project. Reports of internal tests say the game is bad. We have not seen or heard anything from it in almost two years. This is either going to be cancelled ahead of release or explode on the launchpad. If any game had a Concord-like future ahead of it, if it did actually come out, it’s Fairgames.

Those are the listed games. The other major, non-cancelled projects we know about are an upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn multiplayer monster-hunter, where we’ve seen almost nothing from it, and it will involve the always-risky idea of trying to convert fans of a single player series into something that’s a dedicated multiplayer offering.

Sony carved out a chunk of Bungie to make a new, in-house studio working on the game codenamed Gummy Bears, which does not have a name or any sort of preview footage, and while internal tests have been positive, it’s hardly the first time we’ve heard that before.

Perhaps the most promising item is what we have the least amount of information about, that Jason Blundell has his own studio inside Sony now and may make something cool akin to his Black Ops Zombies experience. But again, zero information here.

Sony may be putting on a brave face, but things are going poorly. Its next two live games are probably not even a coinflip of whether they fail or not, and if there are any ones that work past that, they’re still years away with literally nothing public shown about any of them. It’s not good.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.