When I heard the news that Sony has put the brakes on six of the 12 service games it has in development, my first reaction was ‘Hang on a second. There were 12 of them?!?’ Seriously, I knew Sony had some big plans regarding multiplayer games in The Last of Us and Horizon universes, and that unexpected Marathon revival from Bungie actually looks quite interesting, but 12?!? Come on Sony, how much service spaghetti do you really need to throw at that wall?
Any sensible person would’ve seen that’s overkill, and in a trialsome year for the games industry it looks like the penny’s finally dropped for Sony too; at a time when new service games are struggling to take hold and sometimes it feels like more are shutting down than starting up, Sony has delayed half of its upcoming service game projects, most of which we don’t even know the names of.
Service Spaghetti
It also begs the question: how many service games do you, dear gamer, really want on your PS5, and wouldn’t you actually rather have the resources from the vast majority of those studios working on them dedicated to creating more of the compelling single-player experiences that Sony has become famous for?
Sony’s said in the past that these games will all be in different genres and aimed at different audiences, so in that pile there’s a good chance that—should they come out—you’ll find one or two that you like, but with that amount it’s hard to seem them not cannibalising each other, with the best ones maybe establishing themselves as mainstays on the platform, while the rest fade into obscurity. After all, a single gamer is likely to be drawn to plenty of genres and transcend multiple so-called ‘audiences.’ Simply put, there’s no way all 12 of those service games will just happily end up side by side: it feels like a business model with casualties ready-built into it.
It’s hard for me to get terribly excited by Sony’s service game pursuits, but I also get it. With Microsoft’s Acti-Blizz acquisition, which basically gives them a nice bundle of some of the biggest service game IP with a CoD bow on top, Playstation’s catalogue of cracky service games suddenly looks very thin. Of the first-party stuff, there’s Destiny 2, which by most accounts is good solid service game material, then there’s, well, nothing really. Tumbleweed.
Since Sony shift their focus to single-player games, the PS4 and PS5 outsold their respective Xbox rivals more soundly than ever.
But if you look back through the console wars dating back to the days of the Xbox 360, online games were never Sony’s bread-and-butter. You’d have to go back to the PS3 to see Sony really attempting to compete with Microsoft’s dominant dual-headed beast that was Gears of War and Halo, with Sony having competent but hardly comparable shooters Killzone and Resistance out there, as well as the likes of MAG and SOCOM.
That’s the last generation that Sony really seemed to try competing with Microsoft’s online prowess, and ironically since shifting their focus to single-player in subsequent generations, the PS4 and PS5 outsold their respective Xbox rivals more soundly than ever. And had Sony not done that, then who’d have known that the creators of Killzone and Resistance, Guerrilla Games and Insomniac, were such talented bunches that they’d go on to create the Horizon and Marvel’s Spider-Man games?
Hidden Talents
It genuinely makes me wonder what latent single-player talents are hidden among the studios struggling to meet Sony’s service game ambitions. There’s obviously Naughty Dog and Guerrila Games for a start, and whether you crave a Last of Us Part III or for Naughty Dog to go back to creating cool new single-player IP like they used to, I think there are far fewer people jumping for joy at the Last of Us multiplayer game. Instead of powering on with making those 12 games, despite the evident problems Sony is having with attaining that goal, why not just cut it to six service games, and redirect the rest of the studios to single-player ones; obviously, there’s a ton of wasted resources and management complexity to account for, but logistics aside, and from a gamer’s perspective, doesn’t that sound infinitely more appealing? Isn’t six service games enough?
They’ve done fine these past couple of generations without much of a ‘service’ focus, and I’m concerned that Sony’s current pursuit of these types of games will inhibit the ongoing creation of the wonderful single-player adventures they’ve been thriving on in recent generations.
Just slow down, Sony, you’re gonna be fine!