According to an interview with Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hermen Hulst, the team over at PlayStation is eager to minimise game cancellations, after what has been a difficult year in the video games industry across the board.
It’s been an awful year for PlayStation and fans of live service games. Back in January of this year, Jason Schreier revealed via Bloomberg that Sony cancelled two live service projects, one of which was even a live service God of War game. However, this would be a spinoff by Bluepoint Games, known as the “premier remaster and remake studio“. The other was from Bend Studio, known for Days Gone, who, back in 2021, announced they were working on a new IP. Though at the time not much was known, until 2024, when a new job listing went up for candidates experienced in “live operations”.
And then there’s Marathon, developed by Bungie. We got an announcement in 2023 that the studio would be working on a new entry in the sci-fi trilogy. However, unlike its 1994 counterpart, this newest iteration would be multiplayer only. But, only a few months ago, did Bungie announce that Marathon is delayed… indefinitely. Then, when you look at 2024, there was… Concord.
Though it seems that times, they are a-changing at PlayStation, as the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Hermen Hulst, spoke with the Financial Times about limiting these cancellations. Hulst said that they don’t want their teams to play it safe, but if they do fail, they would like to “fail early and cheaply”. Which does make sense, as Concord wasn’t cheap in the slightest.
In 2022, former CEO of PlayStation, Jim Ryan, announced that by 2025, PlayStation would have launched 12 live service games. This, obviously, didn’t come to fruition. Hulst said that it’s more important “having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities” over the number of live service games. Adding that PlayStation has “put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing”.
Hulst wants more studios to create new IPs so that they can become, well, products that traverse across different media formats, like The Last of Us, a game-turned-TV show, and a screenplay. Which is all well and good, but then you’ve got IP like Until Dawn, which made enough money back to surpass their budget, but was critically rated poorly. Most people were upset with the fact that while there were shared elements to the game (wendigo, Peter Stromare, similar location and story), it would’ve worked better as an original film.
It’s all well and good to try and minimise game cancellations and make sure that studios offer some variety, but it does feel almost laughable due to how headstrong PlayStation has been with trying to make live service games a thing. Considering that a single-player game, published by Sony, not only won Game of the Year at the Game Awards, the DICE Awards and the BAFTAs (as Best Game, as well as four other awards), maybe PlayStation should think about why people love single-player games so much, and less about the next live service/as a service game.
About the Author
Missy Taylor
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Missy is a disabled writer on Boon wurrung land, who is obsessed with Garrus Vakarian and Captain America. You can find them talking about the art of Drag and eating Korean and Japanese food.
