How did Sony spend so much money on new live service games when they have a ready made hit in their vault?
Sony’s plan to launch twelve ‘Games As Services’ titles has been a complete disaster by any standards, fuelled by mismanagement and poor business decisions to the point that almost all of the titles have been cancelled. Naughty Dog spent years making The Last of Us 2 multiplayer before someone pointed out that they’d needed a full time team to work on ongoing content, staff that Naughty Dog simple did not have. Concord’s demise has been widely covered, the game was good but launching a colourful team shooter and not making it free-to-play meant it was dead on arrival.
Most recently, the live service games at Bluepoint and Bend Studio have been cancelled, both had been in development for at least four years. This leaves just Fairgame$ from Jade Raymond’s studio Haven, a Horizon MMORPG, and an unknown live service game from Jason Blundell.
All of this has cost Sony hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’ve had very little success with this strategy. Some of this could have easily been predicted, as launching a game that is competing with the likes of Overwatch was always going to be a massive battle. To do that, you need to generate huge interest in your game and market the socks off it, something Sony failed to do with Concord. Spending millions on a game that looks and feels like ten other free-to-play titles is never going to work – players need a unique hook such as Helldivers 2’s award-winning take on Starship Troopers, or the surefire success of a Gran Turismo 7. Those are Sony’s only live service successes so far.
If only Sony had something in its back catalogue, a well-known franchise that has sold millions of copies in the last couple of generations, already has a track record with multiplayer, and runs on an engine that means a PC version could be made. Oh wait, they do: it’s Killzone.
The Killzone franchise began back in the days of the PlayStation 2 with Sony looking for a shooter to rival Microsoft’s massive hit, Halo. It did not quite reach those heights
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