90% of PlayStation’s Released Live Service Projects Either Failed Or Were Canceled. Is it time for PlayStation to go back and focus on single-player?

[John Elden Ring]

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Will PlayStation rethink their strategy with Games as a Service after the success of Black Myth Wukong, Astro Bot and the absolute failure of Concord?

Of all 14 of 15 GaaS projects greenlit by Jim Ryan, all but a single one has failed.

• Helldivers 2 – Succeeded
• Concord – Failed
• Last of Us 2 Multiplayer – Canceled
• Payback From Bungie – Canceled
• Twisted Metal – Canceled
• New IP From Deviation Games – Canceled
• New IP From London Studio – Canceled
• Spider-Man: The Great Web – Canceled (Only Pitched)

The current GaaS titles in the works by PS Studios are

• Marathon
• Fairgame$
• New IP From Bend Studio
• Horizon multiplayer
• Horizon MMO

PlayStation also have an exclusive dean on Foamstars (currently on life support) and Destructino All Starts (Cancelled).

Do you think PlayStation will change it's strategy back to what they are used to, that being High Quality single player games?

 

[Al Catone]

They will do whatever pays the bills

 

[Ico]

i dont think they will, but it doesnt bother me if they focus on different genres of live service, like a little big planet 4 for example!

 

[Zzero]

If a game was only pitched then it wasn't green-lit.

I also see you don't count MLB and GT as service games. A debatable choice.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

They're so afraid of Live Service. They know it's the future.

Love to see it.

 

[Kokoloko]

They should do both. Like always. And more
Just double down on the AAA single player games. Plus More genres, smaller games too

 

[Kokoloko]

They're so afraid of Live Service. They know it's the future.

Love to see it.

Theres no point trying to antagonise SP fans.

Mp games or gaas has been around for ages and Sony has done them before.
It has a huge fanbase, its gonna get bigger but its no more the future than SP games.

Both SP and MP games, with there DLC/live service or without can carry on like before and get more popular

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Theres no point trying to antagonise SP fans.

Mp games or gaas has been around for ages and Sony has done them before. It has a huge fanbase, its gonna get bigger but its no more the future than SP games. Both SP and MP games, with there DLC/live service or without can carry on like before and get more popular

I'm just responding to the OP.

(Most of your post here is wrong btw. You've avoided important context to diminish the continued rise of GAAS)

 

[MiyazakiLovesKojima]

They're so afraid of Live Service. They know it's the future.

Love to see it.

 

[Muddasar]

They should do both.

Be more selective in their GaaS games and use existing IPs like TLOU, SOCOM, Killzone, MAG and Warhawk for example.

 

[Killer_Sakoman]

They're so afraid of Live Service. They know it's the future.

Love to see it.

Let Sony go wherever they think money is. They will get it if it's there

 

[Danja]

They should do both! Doing only single player games PS4 era is exactly why they did this disastrous overcorrection with GaaS this generation.

 

[peter42O]

BOTH.

Sony just needs to make better decisions. Going with Concord over Factions and the Spider Man multi-player game makes no sense to me at all because without seeing any gameplay of Factions or the Spider Man game getting announced, both are known established popular IP's that will garner a ton of interest based on the IP alone so to go with new IP's still doesn't make any sense to me.

As Zzero said, you're missing MLB The Show which makes Sony a lot of revenue every year and Gran Turismo 7 which just released a free update a month or two ago has also been successful for Sony. I don't know why Foamstars is on that list when that's a Square Enix owned and published IP. If you're going to count that as being from Sony then shouldn't Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero count as well?

The Deviation game was cancelled but Sony appears to have started up a new studio with majority being from Deviation so im expecting that game to just transfer over as opposed to being cancelled.

I do think the Horizon MMORPG can be a success. Leaked images showed that it may have an immortals Fenyx Rising art style which I think looks great and if it can be played solo, I personally will be very interested in it. Other than that, Sony just needs to make better decisions especially in regards to the live service IP's that they're going with as opposed to those they're not.

 

[ethomaz]

One successful cover all failures…

And to reply the OP… Yes.
PlayStation needs to continue investing in GAAS because as platform holder they need to invest in both single player experience and GAAS.

 

[Petekilla]

The problem is that most of PS’s big AAA titles from studios like ND, SSM, Insomniac, and Guerilla are costing too much. And PS titles don’t sell 30/40+ million like Rockstar and Nintendo to mostly make up for that. Sony needs to find a GAAS hit, to offset those rising AAA cost. If Sony doesn’t find that GAAS hit. The. It’s possible that they will downscale most of their AAA SP games, and I’m not sure most PS fans will like that.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Let Sony go wherever they think money is. They will get it if it's there

100%.

This Live Service stuff is waaaaay more important than most people realize.

 

[Shmunter]

All those resources down the drain. We could be swimming in AAAA next Gen tech, narrative, gameplay showpieces instead. Each one a testament to the Sony quality and brand.

But here we are. Who’s going to tell them? They will all fail.

 

[Killer_Sakoman]

100%.

This Live Service stuff is waaaaay more important than most people realize.

Like Concord?

 

[MiyazakiLovesKojima]

One successful cover all failures…

And to reply the OP… Yes.
PlayStation needs to continue investing in GAAS because as platform holder they need to invest in both single player experience and GAAS.

 

[arvfab]

I'm not a friend of GaaS, but PlayStation's strength has always been diversity, so definitely both type of games are important.

But currently it seems like SP games, the type of games they excel at, have taken a secondary role. And that's the reason you see so much negativity towards GaaS.

A game like Astro, as excellent as it is (I think, haven't played it yet), would have been a gap filler between major releases in the past. Now it came more than almost a year after Spider-Man 2, the last major SP release, which itself came out in a year where it was the ONLY major release.