While it has been no secret that Sony’s attempts at expanding its live-service game offerings have largely failed, with the only real success story being Helldivers 2. CFO of the company, Lin Tao, spoke about the negativity surrounding the several failed projects at various studios under the PlayStation Studios banner, and how the company still thinks that, ultimately, going with live service games is a worthwhile endeavour for the company.
“Last year Concord [shut down], and this year Marathon was postponed, so somewhat negative news has been coming out,” Tao said (via an interpreter) during a Q&A session after Sony’s recent earnings call, as caught by VGC. “But if we look at the past five years, five years ago live service games were almost non-existent for PlayStation Studios. We [now] have Helldivers 2, MLB The Show and Gran Turismo 7, and Bungie’s Destiny 2, so we have these four live services contributing to sales and profits in a stable manner.”
Tao also spoke about how the few live-service games that Sony has been offering have managed to contribute to around 40 percent of the revenues generated by PlayStation in this quarter. She also notes that, if a whole year is taken into account, their contribution likely falls down to between 20 and 30 percent. However, this is still a big chunk of the generated revenue, especially when seen from a long-term perspective.
“For Q1 the live service ratio was about 40%, for the full year it’s a little less, probably between 20-30%,” she said. “So in terms of the transformation, it’s not entirely going smoothly, but from a longer-term perspective, if you look at the changes over five years you see that there’s definitely been a change.”
“Of course, we recognise that there are still many issues, so we should learn the lessons from mistakes and make sure that we introduce live service content where there’s less waste and it’s more smooth.”
The mistakes that Tao referred to likely include several cancelled projects, as well as the infamously short-lived shelf life of last year’s Concord. A report as recent as January this year indicated that another live-service project at Days Gone developer Bend Studio had also been cancelled. The game was reportedly under development for several years before being cancelled.
Some of the major cancelled live service projects at Sony include The Last of Us Online, multiplayer Spider-Man game, a rumoured reboot of the Twisted Metal series, and an unannounced game at London Studio. While Sony itself hadn’t made any comments regarding the matter, rumours from earlier this year had indicated that the failure of Concord led to the cancellation of these projects.
“Sony has been shell-shocked from Concord, and now they’re going around to every studio and reassessing every project,” said Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb back in January. “If it’s a live-service project, there’s a lot of friction against it, preventing it from getting a chance to come out.”
Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida had also revealed after resigning from the company that he would have pushed back against this focus on live-service games.