Sony’s Live-Service Game Status Report — Canceled, Released, Shut Down

Sony's Live-Service Game Status Report -- Canceled, Released, Shut Down


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Like many other companies, PlayStation pushed into the very popular, potentially lucrative, and very competitive, live-service market by making a number of bets, and not all of them have paid off. Most recently, Sony confirmed that it canceled multiple projects, including a live-service God of War and another live-service title from Bend.

There have been successes, too, mostly notably Helldivers 2. The game sold more than 12 million copies, ranking as the No. 3 best-selling game of 2024 in the US through November. Sony’s multiplayer game Concord, on the other hand, failed to find an audience and was quickly taken offline, with its studio shuttered.

In this post, we’re rounding up all the multiplayer/live-service games PlayStation has in development and providing a status report on them. This was inspired by Radec on social media, who was first to compile a rundown of Sony’s live-service projects and their status.

It was reported in 2023 that PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who left Sony in 2024, had a mandate that Sony’s teams should make more games-as-a-service titles. A number of PlayStation developers were reportedly upset with this, and the blame was said to have fallen not on Ryan but Connie Booth, one of the most important and veteran PlayStation developers, leading to her eventual departure.

Another former PlayStation boss, Shuhei Yoshida, recently said the chance of finding success in the competitive live-service market was “small,” but his replacement, Hermen Hulst, was given the resources to fund both single-player games and live-service titles at the same time. However, had Yoshida stayed in that role, he said he would have “tried to resist” the push into the live-service market. He joked, “That’s one of the reasons they removed me.”

Prior to the cancellation of The Last of Us Online and the live-service God of War most recently, Sony indicated it was pulling back from its ambitious live-service strategy. Back in 2023, Sony management said it would only go ahead with six live-service games in the near future, down from a dozen. At the time, management said it was attempting to focus on quality over quantity. But that’s not the end of PlayStation’s foray into live-service, so let’s take a look at how things have gone so far and where future projects stand.

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