What was rumored to happen for many weeks, possibly months, has finally happened, yet again: Layoffs. Bungie is going from 825 employees to possibly half that following the last content update for Destiny 2. PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst says that most of the Destiny team is effectively gone. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean is Quantic Dream, coming off the failure of Spellcasters: Chronicles, apparently in development for eight years. Employees are going on strike, protesting a planned 115 layoffs because it could spell doom for Star Wars Eclipse – perhaps the one project that anyone actually cares about from the studio.
Lest we forget, the year has been full of other live-service failures, big and small. Highguard is the most prominent, but Destruction AllStars recently saw its servers shut down as well. After a whopping five years of development and $880 million spent, Sega cancelled its Super Game project. And lest we forget, Sony shut down Bluepoint Games after having it on a live-service project for years. Even among lesser-known companies, it’s looking grim. Wildgate, which launched last year to some fanfare, won’t receive any more content after its next update.
But don’t worry, everyone. Amid all these high-profile failures and money sinks, Hideaki Nishino, fearless president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, told Famitsu about his plans to “revitalize the market” via first- and third-party content. The answer? Live service games.
The company is focusing on new releases but also “considering what we can do with older titles in the medium to long term.” He even considers Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls to be a live-service game for…reasons.
When asked if PlayStation truly wants to pursue the model – because who could believe it after so many project cancellations and studio closures – Nishino said, “With live service games, it’s important to continuously provide something. The genre itself is relatively new, and I think many people are trying various things, so we also want to continue to take on challenges within that context.”
Yes, that’s right. The genre which grew to prominence with Destiny, Fortnite and whatnot, which has seen more failures than hits in the past decade, is still “relatively new.” And PlayStation can do nothing to actually overcome those challenges. So if you thought Jim Ryan’s departure would mean that the company suddenly pivots its business strategy, well, maybe think again.
Let’s leave aside the irony of wanting to continue pursuing live-service after laying off hundreds of developers who worked on one of the pioneers of the model. What truly baffles me about all this is how, even with all these setbacks, the disaster that was Concord, and considering one of the main appeals of Sony’s consoles is its prestige single-player titles, it still wants to keep trying with live service. Where at first you don’t succeed, you apparently fail, fail, fail again, fail some more and keep trying because why not?
We’ve already gone over the Marathon situation. On Steam, at least, it’s now at its second straight day under 10K peak concurrent players. So not quite at Highguard’s level just yet, but lest we forget, even after its upcoming layoffs, Bungie is still a pretty big team. Destiny 2 was considered to be in big trouble when it hit these same numbers, and I would be shocked if Marathon somehow got a pass.
Then there’s Fairgame$ or Break In, or whatever PlayStation thinks it should be called, which we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of in over three years. There hasn’t even been any gameplay. Rumors claim it has an extraction shooter mode, but we don’t even know what the standard gameplay formula is. And no, playtests following the former were not positive, not that anyone could expect them to be at this point.
The only thing that’s left is Horizon Hunters Gathering. I like the series and the gameplay doesn’t look too shabby. But after reports about how this is what most of Guerrilla Games is on for the time being and that the third Horizon game is years away, it just feels like a repeat of The Last of Us Online. And Anthem. And Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. And Redfall, even if those aspirations were allegedly scaled back before its disastrous launch. That is, putting developers who specialize in single-player titles on these live-service ships which ultimately go nowhere.
The hilariously tragic part of it all is that the model itself doesn’t always lend itself to failure. Look at Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile 1 and 2. It’s able to provide consistent content updates for both games – after an awkward transitory period, but still – and now cycles back and forth between leagues. You could argue that it’s an action RPG that doesn’t have the same budget and scale as these other triple-A endeavors, and might be right. But the goal is retention and providing consistent quality content. Sometimes, the developer doesn’t always get it right and is forced to eat crow over some really bad decisions. And yet, it continues to push forward thanks to cultivating a hardcore community, for better or worse.
It feels like bigger companies like PlayStation and, yes, even Xbox, want that same thing, but greenlight projects just to chase trends. If there’s a plan, it certainly doesn’t feel like it, especially with some of these games spending years trying to figure out what to do, wasting time and money. And allocating triple-A-level budgets to begin with is in itself a problem. If Bend Studio released Days Gone 2, you could at least be assured of some returns, and maybe an evergreen title that continues to generate sales down the line. But with a live-service title, you’re essentially rolling the dice. If it underperforms, you lose your initial investment and continue to burn money every day the servers remain online, and when new content is delivered.
Of course, there’s also the fact that the market is too crowded. The live-service model is far from new; it feels like every other live-service game is because their shelf life is so short. And yet, publishers continuously gamble for a chance at a hit and that sweet long-term revenue. Every time, no matter how often it fails, and regardless of how many other failures there have been in the past.
It isn’t realistic to expect anything else at this point because as long as someone is making money in the live-service space, there will always be others who want a piece of the pie. No one can really say how Xbox will fare with its single-player offerings, especially given its baffling exclusive strategies and lackluster console market share. But at least for Sony, the focus on single-player titles should become more prominent.
If games like Astro Bot, which has reportedly reached 4.3 million sales since launching in September 2024, prove anything, it’s that even smaller-scale, linear projects have a place. PlayStation doesn’t always have to invest in these massive titles that require budgets in the hundreds of millions – besides its own IP, there is room for more variety. Even if they underwhelm in the short term, like Saros apparently has, you don’t need to worry about continuing to pay for their upkeep and eventually shutting them down.
Maybe it’s trying something different with games like Marvel Tōkon and Horizon Hunters Gathering. As long as it expects big returns, then even efforts like these won’t be the right fit (and I’m extremely doubtful that there’s any room for the latter). I can respect smaller developers who try to reach for that next viral hit by going into live-service, even if they miss the mark. But for a company like PlayStation to keep throwing millions after millions at the model and have little to show for it is a definition of insanity that defies description.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
