Summary
- Ex-PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida says PlayStation studios like Naughty Dog and Bluepoint aren’t being forced to make live-service games.
- Yoshida says that the effort to expand into live-service is “likely mutual”, and that developers are simply pitching live-service games knowing they’ll get an easy green light.
PlayStation has had a pretty rough couple of years, saved by the quality of its single-player titles as per usual. Last year, we had the complete disaster that was Concord, but PlayStation was able to kind of sweep it under the rug a bit thanks to the success of Helldivers 2 and Astro Bot. Despite Concord’s failure, PlayStation has said that it’s still going to keep developing live-service games, and the biggest question that a lot of people have is why?
PlayStation isn’t known for its live-service strength, despite some high-profile successes, and fans of the system have often wondered why talented, traditionally single-player development studios like Naughty Dog and Bluepoint have been struggling to make live-service titles. For example, Naughty Dog’s long-awaited multiplayer Last of Us game was scrapped in 2023, and we recently learned that Bluepoint had a live-service God of War game scrapped.
Ex-PlayStation Boss Says Studios Aren’t Being Forced Into Live-Service
Many had naturally assumed that Naughty Dog, Bend Studio, and Bluepoint were all forced by PlayStation to focus on live-service, due to that being the general direction of the company over the last couple of years, but ex-PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida doesn’t think it’s that black and white.
Speaking on the Sacred Symbols podcast (thanks PushSquare), Yoshida actually says that it’s unlikely that PlayStation is forcing its studios to make anything that they don’t want to, and that projects are “likely mutual” in their conception.
“From my experience, when studios see the company has a big initiative, [they realize] riding on that gives them a better chance of getting a project approved and supported,”
The idea is that when PlayStation announced to the studios under its umbrella that it intended to heavily invest in live-service games, these studios pitched projects that they thought now had a better chance of being greenlit due to the new initiative.
Of course, we don’t know all the specifics about what goes on behind closed doors, but Yoshida seems to be sure that no PlayStation studio has ever been forced into making a live-service game. Now that PlayStation appears to be putting less focus on live-service games, we should hopefully start to see the platform holder’s slate of upcoming titles diversify a bit.
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