At this point, there’s no other way to say it. Despite “winning” the console generation against Xbox, Sony has its own, enormous issues, and the biggest among them is what an utter failure its live service push has been the last few years, culminating in the death of what was its most storied live service in its roster. Adding this all up, it’s frankly embarrassing:
- Bungie has announced that development on Destiny 2 will cease after a final June update, all future expansions have been canceled. That ends an 11+ year saga with no Destiny 3 planned. Both Bungie and Sony did not have a coherent plan of how to carry on the game after The Final Shape, after which it lost an enormous amount of players. Though even in its darkest time, after six months of zero content, Destiny 2 was still putting up over 150,000 daily players, leading many to believe it was either a mistake to kill it now, or at the very least, not have Destiny 3 greenlit or already in the works. It’s unclear if that sequel will ever actually exist.
- Bungie’s previous role was to advise other studios on live-service games, which amounted to little. The most famous example of Bungie’s guidance was explaining to Naughty Dog exactly what would be required to maintain a live service like its planned Factions game. The studio ultimately decided they didn’t want to do that, and the project was canceled.
- Concord, of course, was the largest failure not just of this crop of games, but possibly the biggest video game launch disaster of all time, barely bringing in 800 concurrent players on Steam after hundreds of millions of dollars spent and years in production. It was shut down after two weeks, and that was in the wake of reports that Sony genuinely believed the game would be its next big IP.
- The live heist shooter Fairgame$ was announced in 2023, and absolutely nothing else from the game has been shown since then. The studio’s leader, Jade Raymond, departed some time ago, and recent reports say it may be pivoting to have more extraction shooter elements. Most are amazed that the game is even still in development at all instead of being canceled, though there’s still time for that.
- Sony announced Horizon: Hunter’s Gathering three months ago, a co-op live game rendering new Horizon heroes in cartoony form and tasking them with hunting monsters. It’s currently in closed alpha tests, but reactions to the reveal were almost uniformly negative and an example of no one really wanting or needing a live multiplayer version of a historic single-player franchise.
- There was a God of War multiplayer game being made by Bluepoint Studios at some point, which was shuttered due to a lack of confidence in the project, and that studio was shut down entirely three months ago.
- A single-player franchise that has done multiplayer well is the Ghost of _____ series, where recent sequel, Ghost of Yotei had a Legends expansion like the first, banding together players in a separate mode using the mechanics of the main game. These offerings are very good, but were not intended to be turned into ongoing live games, and we’ve already reached the point where Legends will not make any new content.
- Helldivers 2, easily Sony’s biggest live-service success, has stabilized with about 10% of the players it had at launch two years ago, which is still decent enough, but hardly the mega-blockbuster it once was. But past that, its developer, Arrowhead, is not a Sony studio and will leave Sony behind to self-publish its next game, so Sony cannot rely on them much longer.
- Finally, we arrive at Marathon, Bungie’s extraction shooter that launched three months ago, and now, with the death of Destiny 2, is Sony’s highest-profile first-party live service game. And it is underperforming. It has a mostly PC playerbase, which peaked at 88,000 Steam concurrents at launch, and has been hovering at around 10-11,000 as of late, lower than Destiny 2 during its content drought. Sony still publicly backs Marathon and is moving more and more Destiny devs over to it. The game plans to expand with PvP and PvE modes, and is recognized as a quality PvPvE extraction game by those playing it, but…not enough people are playing it, especially if it’s now meant to float Bungie as a studio and be Sony’s flagship live service offering, given all of the above.
Sony’s bread and butter of first-party, single-player story games is still intact, with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet coming from Naughty Dog. The much-anticipated Insomniac Wolverine game is out this year. It will try to be “the” place to play the console-only GTA 6 this fall, with a broad hardware base, a marketing deal, and the most powerful console on the market, the PS5 Pro (although that is now $900).
This live service push has been nothing short of a disaster with its main bright spot being a game not even made by a Sony studio. There’s too much weight on Marathon going forward, and the others in production that we know about don’t look like offerings on the path to success (or even release, in some cases). It remains to be seen how far Sony wants to go down this road from here.
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