Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida said he would try to oppose Sony’s controversial push into live video game services.
Yoshida, who was president of SIE Worldwide Studios at Sony Interactive Entertainment from 2008 to 2019, said Some witty games that Sony has always known that investing in live games was risky.
Yoshida’s comments come during a tumultuous time for live games on PlayStation. While Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 proved to be a hit, becoming PlayStation Studios’ fastest-selling game of all time with 12 million units sold in just 12 weeks, other live-action Sony games were either canceled or had disastrous results.
Indeed, Sony’s Concord was one of the biggest video game disasters in PlayStation history, lasting just a few weeks before being taken offline due to staggeringly low player numbers. Sony later decided to completely kill the game and lock up its creator.
This turned out to be a costly failure for Sony. According to a report published by Concord, the initial development agreement was worth approximately $200 million My city. It said the $200 million would not be enough to fund the entire development of Concord, nor did it include the purchase of the intellectual property rights of Concord or Firewalk Studios itself.
The Concord debacle comes after Sony had already canceled Naughty Dog’s multiplayer game The Last of Us. This week, Sony reportedly canceled two unannounced games for its live service, one of which is God of War in development at Bluepoint and the other in development at Bend, the developer of Days Gone.
Yoshida, who left Sony this week after 31 years with the company, discussed the PlayStation Live service in an interview with Kinda Funny Games and said that if he were current Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst, he would postpone the service when it appeared.
“I’m sure they knew it was risky. The chance of the game succeeding in this extremely competitive genre would be slim. However, the company, aware of this risk, gave Hermen the resources and a chance to try it out. I think that’s how they did it. I think it’s great and I hope some of the games will be successful.
“Luckily Helldivers 2 did so well. Nobody expected this. Therefore, it is impossible to plan success in this industry. That’s the funniest part of this business. I hope this strategy works in the end. If I were Hermen, I would probably try to oppose this direction. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they kicked me out of the first party!”
During a recent earnings call, Sony President, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said the company has learned from both the record-breaking launch Helldivers 2 earlier this year and the failure of Concord. Totoki said that specifically in the case of Concord, Sony should have launched development elements such as user testing or internal evaluation “much earlier than we did.”
“We are still in a learning process right now,” Totoki admitted. “Basically, when it comes to new IP, you obviously don’t know the outcome until you try it. So for our reflection, we will probably need to have multiple gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, as well as a timeline for such gates, we need to accelerate them. We should have made these gates much earlier than we did.
Totoki suggested that Sony should have noticed and addressed Concord’s problems earlier in the development process, possibly so that they could improve the game before release.
Totoki then pointed fingers at Sony’s “isolated organization” and Concord’s release window, which could have caused cannibalism. Concord was released in August, shortly after the huge hit Black Myth: Wukong hit PS5 and PC.
“We have a siled organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development and also sales, I think could have been a much smoother process,” Totoki said.
“Moving forward, we have a lot of different windows across our own titles and third-party titles. We want to be able to choose the appropriate and optimal window so that we can deploy it on our own platform without cannibalization, so that we can maximize our efficiency in terms of title launches.
During the same financial call, Sony senior vice president of finance and head of finance Sadahiko Hayakawa compared the launches of Helldivers 2 and Concord, stating that lessons learned would be shared across the company.
“We launched two games with live services this year,” he said. “Helldivers 2 was a huge success and Concord was ultimately shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both of them.
“We intend to share lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management, as well as the process of continually adding extended content and scaling the service once it is released, to strengthen our development management system.
“During the current mid-range plan period, we intend to build on an optimal portfolio of titles that combines single-player games – which are our forte and which have a greater predictability to become hits thanks to our proven IP – with live games that we strive to to grow by taking some risk post-release.”
Looking ahead, a number of PlayStation Live games remain in the pipeline, including Bungie’s Marathon, Guerrilla’s Horizon Online and Haven Studio’s Fairgame$.
Wesley is the UK news editor at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. Wesley can be reached at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wy100@proton.me.
