Looks like Sony have caught the live service jitters. The company have cancelled two online multiplayer games, including one based on God Of War, according to a report by Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier. Two different Sony-owned studios were recently told to stop development on their projects. One of those studios is Bluepoint, known for their work on the Demon’s Souls remake. They were making the unannounced live service God Of War game, according to Schreier. The other studio is Bend, developers of open world zombie ’em up Days Gone. We don’t know what they were working on, aside from the fact it was also to have a live service business model. In any case, both have been canned.
The natural worry here is that the decision will lead to layoffs. Sony confirmed the cancellations, saying they took place after an internal “review”. However they wouldn’t commit to an answer about employee job security, saying only that they didn’t intend to close the studios. Meanwhile, a memo was sent in an effort to reassure staff, letting them know PlayStation would try to “ensure there is minimal business impact”. The company would be working with the studios to figure out what they’ll be working on next, PlayStation told Bloomberg.
“Bend and Bluepoint are highly accomplished teams who are valued members of the PlayStation Studios family,” they said in a statement to Bloomberg, “and we are working closely with each studio to determine what are the next projects.”
Ominous. We didn’t hear much talk about the God Of War game before now. But we knew something was afoot at Bend when they began hiring for staff with experience making blockbuster live service games. Even at the time it seemed unusual for this single player studio to pivot to live service, but this is a general trend chased by Sony since 2022, albeit one they seem to be abandoning of late. The company have cancelled a few other live service projects in recent years, including a multiplayer game based on The Last Of Us and a co-op Spiderman game.
Cancellations are fairly common in the industry, so arguably this is not that unusual. But it does look like the fear has truly been injected into Sony by hydraulic needle following the fate of online hero shooter Concord, a flop estimated to have cost the company at least $200 million, with the real cost likely being higher than that. That includes the human cost of all the workers who lost their jobs when the studio was shuttered as a result.
Live service is an interesting monster in the grander ecosystem of videos gamesing. Huge corporations are attracted to the model thanks to certain heavy hitters like Destiny 2 retaining a magical dollar-shitting ability for years and years and years. But they can be massively attention-demanding for the average player – how many of this type of game can you really play on the reg? My feelings about games-as-a-service is broadly in line with Edwin’s recent eloquent scribblethoughts. Here’s a good part of that:
Even before they became ubiquitous, live service games felt like a burden. They are inherently exhausting to think about. The business model is the experience in a way that it isn’t for anything you “buy once” and theoretically enjoy in your “own time”, away from the sludgepumps of commerce – it breaks the golden rule that art created under capitalism should at least feel like it’s an escape from capitalism, by forcing you to think of playing as an on-going interaction with an evolving product.
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