Is Sony beginning to coast? With PS5 sales up and first-party releases down, gaming’s eerie new normal takes shape

After last night’s State of Play, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re coming to the end of the PlayStation 5 generation. The big guns of Sony Santa Monica and Guerilla are silent, the teased-out reveals of Insomniac’s Wolverine, Bungie’s Marathon, or Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2: On the Beach remain exactly that, still merely teased. Naughty Dog‘s next thing is lurking, off in the distance, gathering whatever secret power that studio ritually summons every near-decade to squeeze impossible reserves of lifeblood from end-of-generation hardware. And here comes a spate of middling remasters and kind-of-neat-looking third-party games to tide us over!

But instead – instead of the usual, late-gen chatter about such-and-such blockbuster surely being a PS6 launch game, or so-and-so remasters being a final, Switch-style scrape of the HD remake barrel; instead of the predictable tentpole rhythms – we are smack bang in the middle of the PS5’s prime. And given that, this all just feels very weird.

After a quiet-ish year in 2024, carried by the surprise hit of Helldivers 2 and the Concord-burying good will of Astro Bot, the hope was that 2025 – fuelled by Ghost of Yotei, Death Stranding 2 and the assumed untold, unannounced riches of Sony’s many other studios – would bang. There’s still plenty of room for surprise reveals or breakout hits – everyone’s continued inability to predict the next game of the moment is arguably this industry’s trademark; breakout hits its only real guarantee – so if not a bang, at least a gentle pop? Even then, we are short of a few blockbusters here, and Sony is nothing if not a peddler of blockbusters these days. And the timing is rather odd.

There’s a fairly obvious explanation for that oddness, mind. A lot of the games Sony’s had in the pipeline for the PS5 have, reportedly, been summarily cancelled in the past few months. Bend, the developer of Syphon Filter, Days Gone and meaty handheld exclusives like Uncharted: Golden Abyss, had the plug pulled on a new open-world game with multiplayer elements. At the same time, Bluepoint, the team behind a streak of excellent remasters including Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls, had a live-service God of War game cancelled. This is on top of cancelled co-op games from Insomniac and the now-shuttered London Studio, a cancelled multiplayer The Last of Us spin-off from Naughty Dog, and a cancelled live service Twisted Metal project from embattled Liverpudlian studio Firesprite. And, of course, Concord.

These projects were the result of a pivot to live services under former executive Jim Ryan, their subsequent cancellations a result of a pivot, apparently, back away from live services before they could make it out the door. (Fellow members of the online publishing world will likely share a tangible wince at each “pivot” here. Ask any journalist you meet about the mid-2010s “pivot to video”, and then maybe buy them a stiff drink.) The result, either way, is a big, gaping hole where all the first-party PlayStation video games ought to be.

One other factor here bears mentioning: Xbox. There is an increasing likelihood that there will be more Xbox Game Studios-published games launching on PS5 this year than Sony ones. Microsoft, despite probably its best slate of first-party games in a decade, has effectively thrown in the towel on selling consoles this generation, and perhaps all generations, by shifting to a model of open, multiplatform publishing. With Nintendo firmly off in its own wonderful world, that means PlayStation is currently operating in one free of any true, direct competition. Yes, its blockbuster void is shaped by the major unforced errors of pivoting and un-pivoting to service games and back, but this wider point shouldn’t be ignored. Companies tend to make more unforced errors when they can get away with it.

Meanwhile, a curious twist: the PS5 just had its best ever financial quarter of console sales, and is tracking almost exactly in line with shipped units of the PS4. Monthly active users – the amount of people playing games on the console – are up considerably, 129m to 90m, on the equivalent period of the previous console. And player spend is through the roof, driven by engagement-farming live-service games – those again! – such as FC, Call of Duty, Fortnite and the rest all consolidating their position as acceptable time- and wallet-syphons, and concentrating now onto a single platform. At the same time, Xbox’s console sales have tanked, while its Game Pass numbers just hit a record.

All this combines to make for an eerie kind of new status quo: Microsoft retreating to its familiar ground of software provider, Sony defaulting to the de facto platform-holder, and importantly, a continuous flow of subscription and microtransaction spend now fully the norm. And all the while, a strange kind of disconnect. Much as there are always gems to be mined – I’d trust Returnal developer Housemarque with my life, though Saros isn’t until 2026 again – the days of multiple, massive first-party games launching in a single year might be behind us.

Whether that matters for Sony is another question. It has GTA 6 to expect this year, a game so anticipated, so likely to shift consoles by the truckload, it arguably gives the PS5 Pro more reason to exist than anything of Sony’s own. (It’s worth remembering the PS4 generation, tracking so closely to this one, never actually got a new Grand Theft Auto game of its own). And it probably feels like the combination of Ghost of Yotei, Death Stranding 2, and its growing suite of third-party marketing deals are plenty. At a time when Xbox has left the full console exclusive behind, PlayStation has never needed them less. And yet, the eeriness of that once-full void lingers. Amongst big profits for Sony, and big spending from players, it feels like we should maybe be getting just a little more.