Insiders say PlayStation’s direct services pivot may not go well

PlayStation’s Jim Ryan era left behind a successful PS5 and a string of predictably good first-party releases, so attention now turns to Sony’s stated higher investment in live service games. They previously announced that 60% of their spending would go up to 40% on their single-player games, and they have at least a dozen titles.

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports Insiders are concerned about the company’s future vision. Things range from “seemingly confusing bets on games on the service” to the PSVR 2 and PlayStation Portal, both relatively niche hardware.

Sony currently has most of its big-budget studios working on multiplayer live service games in one form or another, including Naughty Dog, Insomniac, The Last of Us popular Guerrilla, Spider-Man and Horizon. We already know about Naughty Dog’s Last of Us Factions, a game that a new Bungie employee told Bungie up to date in an additional report when they recently checked on the game’s progress. While Bungie has its own upcoming service games such as Marathon and current streaming service giant Destiny 2, these are not exclusive to PlayStation.

The goal, of course, is to have live service games that let you print money indefinitely, with recurring spending in seasons and microtransactions, as opposed to one-on-one single-player games that only have one or two great DLCs. This is definitely Sony’s obvious strength inside These popular single-player games and these internal reports call this huge live service pivot into question, even if single-player games are made.

It doesn’t make sense that just because a company makes great single-player games, they can translate that talent into a compelling live service offering, even with a specialist like Bungie. In fact, it can be the opposite. We have seen this many times in the industry. Bioware left Mass Effect to develop Anthem, but that failed, so they’ve now returned to Mass Effect. Crystal Dynamics turned away from Tomb Raider to make Marvel’s Avengers, which failed, and has now returned to Tomb Raider. Gearbox left Borderlands to create Battleborn, which failed and now returned to Borderlands. Do you sense a pattern here?

Even if these upcoming shows are in the universe of these games, for example. There’s no guarantee of quality or positive reception for The Last of Us, regardless of which talented studio is on board. The most popular multiplayer games are either always multiplayer games (Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, DOTA, League of Legends) or relatively nowhere to be seen (Fortnite, PUBG, Tarkov). Bungie even developed Destiny from the Halo DNA, a series that always has exciting single-player and multiplayer parts.

In most cases taking over single-player studios and forcing them to do something they’ve never done before on a significant scale doesn’t seem like a recipe for success, or a live studio pursuing the dream of taking resources away from potentially successful single-player projects. Karma service seems like a dream. The bubble is bursting. Or that explosion has already happened, based on the title I failed to mention.

I’m not expecting much from PlayStation’s Live Service plan, and it looks like I’m not alone.

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