We have known for some time that Sony is putting a strong emphasis on live-service titles. In a recent speech to investors, executive leadership shared their thoughts along with some visualizations indicating that by 2025, live-service titles would take the majority of PlayStation’s investment dollars. That’s about 18 months away. Fairgame$,Marathonand Concord are three of those games. As little as we know about how they will play, we have a very good idea of Sony’s ambitions for them. These ambitions and some of the ambiguous dates provided may also tell us how desperately Sony needs these games to resonate.
The vague timeline, combined with a bare-bones showing of first-party titles in the latest PlayStation Showcase, showed Sony’s belly a bit more than they would want the community to believe. Firstly, the fact that we saw so many first-party titles being announced, with only one showing us gameplay, indicates that the production studios may be further behind than we thought. That’s significant when you consider that the last PlayStation Studios game (God of War: Ragnarok) was released seven months ago. The pipeline that PlayStation Studios games demand means development teams often have hundreds of people working on a project for a half-decade or more.
Even in the PS4 era, most of Sony’s first party releases took 5-7 years to make, and even those games had smaller teams, budgets and scope than their PS5 brethren. It suggests that blockbuster titles from the blue team could take half the generation or more to develop. WithHorizon Forbidden Westreleasing last year, it wouldn’t surprise me if we see Horizon’s third entry as a swansong to the PS5 generation in 2028.
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With this cadence and the number of studios Sony has, we may continue to see one to two first-party games from Sony per year. While one could expect each game to sell tens of millions of copies, that still leaves a whole lot of downtime in between, which is where the live-service stuff comes in.
Sony doesn’t just want live-service games to extract more money from consumers. Theyneedthose games to give their fans first-party content to play consistently. A big part of Playstation’s lustre is its first-party roster, and if those games get fewer and further between, then the platform loses some of its lustre. Every major entertainment company knows that a steady cadence of content is the key to keeping the coffers ringing. Of course Sony has third parties, and those will always exist, but no modern entertainment company wants to be reliant on its partners.
Sony may be winning the console war, but they aren’t winning the player-engagement war, which is won through live-service games. Major third-party games like Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Apex Legends take up the bulk of playtime across any given platform. When those third-party games are playable everywhere, the fact that they are being played on PlayStation is a convenient happenstance. It is not, however, a guarantee for future success. That guarantee can only come from being the developer and publisher of a given service game. Sony bought that privilege with Destiny 2. They may not have the gumption to bet bigger than that.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard isn’t just a threat because of Call of Duty. There’s no better company than Acti-Blizz at keeping its players engaged. There are still plenty of people who play 20+ year-old Blizzard games like the original Starcraft and Diablo 2. Say all you want about Blizzard’s ethics, they are a studio that knows how to keep players hooked even better than Bungie. World of Warcraft has been releasing an expansion just about every other year for a decade. Hearthstone releases new content every four months (for better or worse). Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 have seasons, battle passes and record-breaking engagement.
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Bungie keeps coming up in discussions about Sony’s ambitions. Destiny 2 releases a major expansion once a year, but it’s important to remember that a typical Destiny campaign can be finished in under 10 hours. Fans will often spend the weekend getting through the story, then spend the rest of the year grinding for loot and parsing bits of lore until the next expansion launches. In Jim Ryan’s eyes, that’s a far better model than spending five years working on a single-player game that only keeps fans engaged for a few months.
The recent rumors about The Last of Us' unannounced multiplayer game being scaled back have suggest that this wasn’t due to the game’s quality, but concerns (raised by Bungie) that the game wouldn’t keep players perpetually engaged. It makes sense, given the flood of content pouring into Fortnite, Warzone, Destiny 2 and Apex Legends every few months. When a new live-service game comes out, it needs to catch players hook, line and sinker, otherwise they’ll eat up your content and go right back to their old game. If Naughty Dog isn’t set up to deliver fast, reactive content at the same cadence as the other guys, they’ll be launching a dead game. That’s a difficult thing to explain to investors.
Despite the setback and public perception of Naughty Dog’s stumbling, Jim and co. may be right to stay the course for a live-service future. Any gaming company that wants to stay in business needs to figure out a way to deliver content on a regular schedule, and that kind of pipeline simply doesn’t work with Sony’s glossy single-player games. Old fans may not like it, but every game publisher out there is competing more with Fortnite or Diablo than they are with God of War.
The question still remains, however, of when exactly any of these games will be ready. Long-term, Sony needs the likes of Destiny, Helldivers 2, Marathon, and eventually The Last of Us to fill the gaps between long stretches of major releases. It may not be what the Sony faithful pine for, but in order for single-player games to be sustainable in the future, Sony needs to get on that live-service train.
