For a long time, Sony’s PlayStation division based much of its success on the highly successful single player action/adventure games produced by its first-party studios. Games like Uncharted, The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Ghost of Tsushima delivered excellent narrative-driven experiences that were acclaimed by critics and consumers alike, each of them selling millions of copies while helping the sales of PlayStation hardware, too.
However, following in the footsteps of big third-party publishers like Ubisoft, EA, Activision Blizzard, and Take-Two, Sony eventually realized it would have to invest in live service games as this category slowly but surely gained market share with every passing year.
In early 2022, Sony told its investors of the plan to release ten live service games by March 2026. To reach this objective, the PlayStation division began a series of big investments and acquisitions, such as Bungie, Haven, Firewalk, Deviation.
However, the past couple of weeks have painted a less than flattering picture of the first wave of live service games developed by the PlayStation studios.
To start with, Deviation was hit with layoffs, and it is believed that their first project has been canceled. Earlier this week, the PlayStation Showcase event provided first looks at some of the live service games, such as Haven’s FAIRGAME$ and Firewalk’s Concord, but neither impressed.
The FAIRGAME$ trailer looked way too similar to Creative Assembly’s Hyenas, for example, to the point where the average user may well be confusing one with the other. Moreover, it was disappointing to see Jade Raymond’s team working on yet another heist shooter based on a ‘steal from the rich people’ concept (as if it wasn’t one of the hottest trends) instead of an innovative action/adventure multiplayer game.
As for Concord, the teaser trailer was a lot more cryptic, but Firewalk confirmed this is going to be yet another Sci-Fi PvP first-person shooter, broadly falling in the same category as Bungie’s Marathon. The latter is perhaps the most promising out of the games presented at the PlayStation Showcase between Bungie’s pedigree and the reportedly ambitious features, but even this game will be just another PvP extraction shooter at its core, like so many on the market.
All those live service games lacked originality and variety in their public debuts. But the harshest blow struck yesterday when Naughty Dog announced that the massively anticipated The Last of Us multiplayer game would need more time before it could be shown to the world.
Such news already put fans of the original game’s Factions mode in a bad mood since they had been waiting for over three years. Then Schreier’s report hit the Web, detailing on Bloomberg how the team had been scaled down (at Bungie’s indication, apparently) and the game itself was under complete re-evaluation of its direction.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be so surprising. We’ve seen plenty of renowned triple-A studios trying to transition from single player to live service and partially or totally failing, such as BioWare with Anthem, Bethesda with Fallout 76, Crystal Dynamics with Marvel’s Avengers, and PlatinumGames with Babylon’s Fall, just to name a few. Even CD Projekt RED had to scrap their plans for a Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer game.
If there’s something we should have learned from these releases is that developing successful live service games is incredibly hard, and there’s no surefire recipe to get it right, even if you’ve got royalty pedigree among single player games.
Of course, other PlayStation live service projects still need to be unveiled, like the PS5 online game in development at London Studio or the PvE multiplayer project Insomniac was hiring for two years ago. Guerrilla also announced a Horizon online co-op game, though we already know it will stray from the single player games with a brand new stylized look (which didn’t look appealing in a leak), causing some fans to wrinkle their noses at the mere notion. Rumors also point to a Twisted Metal revival in development at FireSprite (a studio that worked on The Persistence, Star Citizen, and Horizon Call of the Mountain).
I’ll be waiting to get more details and demonstrations of all these games, as I have no preconceived bias against live service releases, but I can’t help but feel disappointed at what Sony has shown so far, both in quality and variety, with most games being PvP shooters. I also wonder if they are making the right choice in moving so much of the PlayStation division’s game investment to live service (55% this year, 60% by fiscal year 2025) when their studios’ true strength lies in traditional games.
