PlayStation’s incessant need to try and pump out lucrative live-service titles like Destiny or Fortnite has scarred the gaming industry in several ways over the past few years, and thankfully, it seems the company has finally given up.
Concord was the biggest and most blatant failure of Sony’s attempts to recreate the successes that only a handful of titles have been able to foster in gaming across any platform. Rare titles like Warframe, GTA Online, Genshin Impact, Apex Legends, and the two aforementioned titles above are few and far between. But that hasn’t stopped Sony from pivoting talented studios away from what has made them successful in the past to try and recapture GaaS (games as a service) glory. Live-service titles are extremely expensive to maintain, and Sony and many very unfortunate developers have found this out the hard way.
The latest casualties in this failed experiment are Bluepoint Games and Bend Studio, according to a report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. Two studios that don’t have much experience, if any, in developing a continual live-service game have now had multiple years of work shuttered.
Bend, makers of PS5-exclusive zombie action title Days Gone, were apparently working on an unknown live-service game. And Bluepoint, developers of the hit Demon’s Souls remake and several other well-made remaster projects, were working on a live-service title in the God of War franchise.
Yes, you read that right. A God of War live-service by the makers of remakes like Demon’s Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, and several other HD remasters. I genuinely want to know who thought that this would be a good idea because the mere idea sounds baffling.
This is like taking a master chef who excels at creating savory dishes and putting them on the production line at a Hostess factory, packaging Twinkies. It’s ridiculous, and now years of the developers’ time and work have gone down the drain, all because Sony shifted them away from what they were great at to make something that is supposed to make more money over a longer period of time.
But this is just the latest in a line of several canceled projects, including Concord, the massive flop that had its servers shut down mere weeks after launching to less than 1,000 players on Steam. I played Concord, I enjoyed it, but at $40, a hero shooter in 2024 with nothing to separate itself from the free-to-play field was doomed to fail. Still, Sony persisted.
I feel awful for the countless developers who bleed into these projects with passion and commitment, only to have Sony say “oops” and cut bait, including laying off workers at several studios. It’s got to stop. PlayStation needs to let their talented studios that work under the PS banner make the games they want to make and the games that they are good at making, or there will inevitably be more canceled projects and more layoffs.
And then, of course, there’s the canceled The Last of Us multiplayer project that was shut down, along with a Marvel’s Spider-Man multiplayer title, and a Twisted Metal live-service game that was also stopped. The list has grown for years and it needs to end.
In 2022, Sony purchased Destiny maker Bungie for $3.7 billion, but let the studio continue its own work on Destiny 2 and other projects as an “independent subsidiary” of the company. Part of the reason that the studio was bought, though, was due to its expertise in live-service games, and Bungie’s review of Naughty Dog’s multiplayer The Last of Us game had a lot to do with its cancellation.
There are still a couple more live-service games in progress under PlayStation, including Bungie’s Marathon and rumored games like a Horizon MMO. But if these titles are still set to launch, they will need to perform well out of the gate like Sony’s rare live-service success in Helldivers 2, or they risk being taken offline as well.
It’s a lucky thing that the PS5 has performed as it has in sales, because Sony has botched several projects and ideas throughout this entire generation. Things could’ve been much worse than it already has been—which is to say, catastrophic for all of the studios hit by layoffs.
Thankfully, the company still has world-class developers like Naughty Dog working on the singleplayer Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Insomniac taking its time with Marvel’s Wolverine and eventual Marvel’s Spider-Man 3, and Sucker Punch putting the finishing touches on Ghost of Yōtei. As they should.
I hope 2025 will be a better year for the industry as a whole, but especially for the studios under PlayStation who should be allowed to make the type of game they’re best at.
Published: Jan 17, 2025 01:17 pm