Marathon
It feels like yesterday when Sony was laying out a plan to use 60% of its PlayStation budget to make and release 12 live service games in the next few years. Now, after internal reports that this idea was not going so well, Sony has told investors they are halving that amount.
Six live service offerings are still supposed to be out in FY2025, which is by March 2026. But the other six will now be delayed past that, timeline unknown. Here’s Sony president Hiroki Totoki:
“We are reviewing this. We have not been able to meet the gamers’ expectations, but we are trying as much as possible that this would be played by the gamers and liked by gamers for a long time. So six titles will be released by FY ’25. That’s our current plan. And the remaining six titles, as for when to be released, we are still working on that.”
There have been few indicators that this push into live service is going how Sony planned. A key to the entire endeavor was Sony purchasing Bungie for $3.7 billion, but Bungie’s own live service game, Destiny 2, has struggled mightily with falling player retention and spending this past year, with leadership even telling employees at the studio that the entire company may have gone under were it not for the Sony deal.
But Bungie was also meant to be brought in to teach PlayStation’s single player studios how to build live service games. The only report we’ve heard from that is that Bungie did not think The Last of Us Factions was up to par, and that game reportedly had its team scaled back, even if it’s still in production. It’s not clear whether that’s one of the ones that’s supposed to be out by FY2025, but Naughty Dog has already been working on it for several years.
Destiny 2
Bungie’s own Marathon is reportedly being delayed from 2024 to 2025, though nothing has been announced publicly. I am sure the goal is that it’s one of the six that makes it out before March 2026, though unlike some of these other games, it will be a multiplatform title, not a PlayStation exclusive.
Sony bet big on the idea that they could suddenly create a huge portion of their business that’s live service while ignoring all the times that dedicated single player studios were tasked with doing such a thing, only to have it backfire. While yes, the idea that big single player games cannot often justify their sprawling budgets these days, it is equally true that breaking out in the live service space in any meaningful capacity is extraordinarily difficult. The theory is you only need one “Fortnite” to offset a bunch of failures, but as it stands, this does not seem like it was a wise path for Sony to take, given recent events.
We’ll see when these games start rolling out in full, and how their success or failure may continue to alter Sony’s plans in the future.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
