Forget about live service, PlayStation already has a brilliant solution to its single-player games dilemma
If you follow broader industry trends, particularly when it comes to the types of games every publisher is keen to have in their catalogues (before they realise it may not be such a good idea to invest so much in one basket), you’ll definitely be familiar with Sony’s nascent push into live service games.The company’s efforts are still so much in their infancy that we’re only now getting the first of its 12 planned games. Even well before we could play a single one, Sony delayed half of them. Whether or not anyone cares about the games themselves, the desire to diversify PlayStation’s first-party output is easy to understand. Sony is keenly aware that making increasingly expensive single-player games is not going remain sustainable for long – it already barely is.
One way to go about achieving that goal is to bring PlayStation games to other platforms, a bridge Sony already cross. The once historic stance against publishing first-party games on anything but PlayStation hardware has already been reversed. We now live in an era of PS5/PS4 exclusives landing on PC quite predictably two years after their debut on PS consoles.
But it’s clearly not enough, especially if Sony continues to pretend Xbox, and Nintendo platforms won’t offer meaningful growth in sales. Which brings us back to the other prong to the strategy: live service games.
Read more
