Sony appears to have picked up on the fluctuations surrounding the live service. According to them, the company has canceled two online multiplayer games, including one based on God Of War report by Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier. Recently, two different Sony-owned studios were told to stop working on their projects. One such studio is Bluepoint, known for its work on the Demon’s Souls remake. According to Schreier, they were filming an unannounced live-action God Of War game. The second studio is Bend, creators of the open-world zombie game Days Gone. We don’t know what they were working on, except that it was supposed to be a live services business model. In any case, both have been preserved.
The natural fear is that this decision will lead to layoffs. Sony confirmed the cancellation, saying it came after an internal “review.” However, they did not commit to providing answers about employee safety, stating only that they did not intend to close the studios. Meanwhile, a memo was sent to reassure employees, informing them that PlayStation will strive to “ensure minimal business impact.” The company will work with the studios to find out what they will work on next, which is PlayStation he told Bloomberg.
“Bend and Bluepoint are incredibly talented teams that are valued members of the PlayStation Studios family,” they wrote in a statement to Bloomberg, “and we are working closely with each studio to determine what their next projects will be.”
Ominous. We haven’t heard much about God Of War before. However, we knew something was happening in Bend when they started hiring employees with experience in creating hit live games. Even then, it seemed unusual for this single-player studio to switch to a live service, but here it is a general trend that Sony is following from 2022, although they seem to have abandoned it recently. The company has canceled several other live service projects in recent years, including a multiplayer game based on The Last Of Us and a cooperative Spiderman game.
Cancellations are quite common in the industry, so it’s probably not that unusual. However, it appears that fear has truly been instilled into Sony by the hydraulic needle following the fate of the online shooter Concord, which was estimated to cost the company at least $200 million, with the actual cost likely to be higher. This includes the human costs of all employees who lost their jobs as a result of the studio closure.
Live is an captivating monster in the grander video game ecosystem. Huge corporations are interested in this model thanks to certain hits like Destiny 2 that retain their magical ability to shit in dollars for years. However, they can require a huge amount of attention for the average gamer – how many games of this type can you really play on reg? My feelings about games as a service are broadly in line with Edwin’s recent expressive thoughts. Here’s the good part:
Even before they became ubiquitous, live gaming felt like a burden. Thinking about them is inherently exhausting. The business model is an experience in the sense that it is not something you “buy once” and theoretically enjoy “in your own time”, away from the commercial sludge pumps – it breaks the golden rule that art created under capitalism should at least feel that it is an escape from capitalism, forcing you to think of the game as a constant interaction with an evolving product.
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