By the time Sony started printing money releasing its exclusives onto PC, the company had made a name for itself delivering the biggest and best singleplayer games on the market. Its run of solo PS4 exclusives from Bloodborne to The Last of Us Part 2 was so strong that it blew Microsoft’s console strategy out of the water, in a way that the Xbox has arguably never recovered from. Even we PC heads with our vast Steam libraries had to acknowledge those games were pretty great.
Yet for the PlayStation 5, Sony decided it would almost completely ignore that legacy, and instead be all about live service. In 2022, former CEO Jim Ryan promised Sony would make and release 12 live-service games by 2025. As of 2025, only one of these—Helldivers 2—has enjoyed a successful launch. Seven were cancelled before release. Three are supposedly still in development (including the deeply troubled Marathon) and one of them was Concord.
It’s a strategy that has, so far, proven catastrophic, leaving the PS5 largely bereft of quality first-party exclusives. But if you thought gazing upon this virtual graveyard might cause Sony to reconsider its priorities, think again.
Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Studio Business Group CEO Herman Hulst was recently asked about Sony’s live-service strategy by the Financial Times (via GamesRadar), as part of an in-depth article about the company’s broader business strategy. “The number [of live-service releases] is not so important,” Hulst told the FT. “What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities.”
Instead of changing strategy to avoid massive live-service failures like Concord, or cancellations like The Last of Us Online, Hulst says he basically wants Sony to fail better. “I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.”
To change these massive failures into, er, smaller failures, Hulst says PlayStation has implemented several new safeguards, such as “more rigorous and more frequent testing in many different ways.” According to the FT, this includes a higher priority on group testing, more cross pollination of ideas within Sony, and “closer relationships” between top executives. “The advantage of every failure…is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”
I would be more convinced by what Hulst says if Sony had demonstrated its PS4-era strategy no longer worked before going all in on chasing the theoretical live-service money train. Those glossy singleplayer titles were often enormously expensive to make, and selling games in general has become significantly harder over the last five years. But while Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 seems to have been a commercial disappointment, God of War: Ragnarok was the fastest-selling PlayStation title ever on launch in 2022, and had sold 15 million copies a full year before it came to PC in September last year.
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