Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has said he would have tried to resist Sony’s controversial live service video game push.Yoshida, who was President of SIE Worldwide Studios for Sony Interactive Entertainment from 2008 to 2019, told Kinda Funny Games that Sony always knew its investment in live service games was risky.Yoshida’s comments come amid a tumultuous time for PlayStation live service games.
While Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 was a breakout hit, becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time with 12 million copies sold in just 12 weeks, Sony’s other live service games were either canceled or suffered disastrous launches.Indeed, Sony’s Concord is one of the biggest video game disasters in PlayStation history, lasting just a couple of weeks before it was brought offline amid eye-wateringly low player numbers.
Sony later decided to kill the game entirely and shut its developer.It has proved a costly failure for Sony. Concord's initial development deal was around $200 million according to a report by Kotaku.
It said the $200 million was not enough to fund Concord's entire development, nor did it include the purchase of the Concord IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself.The Concord flop came after Sony had already canceled Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game.
And just this week, Sony reportedly canceled two unannounced live service games, one a God of War title in development at Bluepoint, the other in the works at Days Gone developer Bend.Yoshida, who left Sony this week after 31 years at the company, discussed PlayStation live service in the interview with Kinda Funny Games, saying if he were current Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst, he would have pushed back on live service back when it emerged. “For me, I was managing this budget, so I was responsible for allocating money to what kinds of games to make,” Yoshida said. “If the company was considering [going] that way, it probably didn’t