{"id":126460,"date":"2025-08-07T13:45:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T13:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/126460\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T13:45:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T13:45:09","slug":"playstation-admits-live-service-gaming-is-not-going-entirely-smoothly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/126460\/","title":{"rendered":"PlayStation Admits Live-Service Gaming Is ‘Not Going Entirely Smoothly’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sony\u2019s chief financial officer has suggested that live-service gaming hasn\u2019t been a\u00a0complete unmitigated success for PlayStation. With quite some impressive understatement, following a year that saw the overwhelming failure of Concord<\/a> and serious delays to Bungie\u2019s\u00a0Marathon<\/a>, CFO Lin Tao told shareholders on a Q&A call following the release of Sony\u2019s latest financial results<\/a> that \u201cit\u2019s not entirely going smoothly.\u201d<\/p>\n

She did, however, defend the company\u2019s continued forays into the genre, pointing out that while there have been a few hundreds of millions of dollars hiccups<\/a>, there have been successes too. As\u00a0VGC reports<\/a>, acknowledging that \u201csomewhat negative news has been coming out,\u201d Tao pointed out, \u201cif we look at the past five years, five years ago live-service games were almost non-existent for PlayStation Studios. We 1754574309 have Helldivers 2, MLB The Show and\u00a0Gran Turismo 7, and\u00a0Bungie\u2019s\u00a0Destiny\u00a02, so we have these four live services contributing to sales and profits in a stable manner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fair play on\u00a0Helldivers 2. The game is listed in the latest financial report<\/a> as having sold 12 million copies across PS5 and PC, although is thought to have sold more than 15 million, and is obviously a massive hit. But it\u2019s worth noting that Destiny 2 came out eight years ago in 2017 from Activision, for Xbox and PlayStation, and Bungie was only bought by Sony in 2022.\u00a0MLB The Show comes out with a new edition annually, so makes for an odd \u201clive-service\u201d proposition, and it\u2019s notable that Sony doesn\u2019t include its sales in its report. Gran Turismo 7 however, launched in 2022, still receives monthly updates, so that counts.<\/p>\n

Given rumors that\u00a0Concord cost anywhere from $200 million to $400 million, and possibly made back around $1 million, it does seem like perhaps this doesn\u2019t entirely balance the scales. But Tao makes the argument that this is still a new revenue stream that Sony didn\u2019t have five years back, so it\u2019s not to be sniffed at. \u201cFor Q1 the live-service ratio was about 40 percent,\u201d VGC reports she told the call. \u201cFor the full year it\u2019s a little less, probably between 20 to 30 percent. So in terms of the transformation, it\u2019s not entirely going smoothly, but from a longer-term perspective, if you look at the changes over five years you see that there\u2019s definitely been a change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thankfully, Sony isn\u2019t pretending it\u2019s all roses. \u201cOf course, we recognize that there are still many issues,\u201d Tao went on to say, \u201cso we should learn the lessons from mistakes and make sure that we introduce live-service content where there\u2019s less waste and it\u2019s more smooth.\u201d<\/p>\n

This likely explains the extreme measures taken following\u00a0Marathon\u2018s extremely badly received alpha<\/a> in April this year, not risking another\u00a0Concord<\/a>-scale disaster so soon after. The game has since been \u201cindefinitely\u201d delayed, but not before it was met with plagiarism accusations<\/a>. Sony also cancelled multiple live-service projects earlier this year<\/a>, further casting doubt on the format as a viable medium.<\/p>\n

Still, the company seems upbeat about the prospects! And it\u2019s certainly got the money to waste. If only it could figure out a way to do it without causing hundreds of people to lose their jobs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sony\u2019s chief financial officer has suggested that live-service gaming hasn\u2019t been a\u00a0complete unmitigated success for PlayStation. With quite…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":126461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[77630,49397,77631,27816,3767,19061,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-126460","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-bungie","9":"tag-concord","10":"tag-live-service","11":"tag-marathon","12":"tag-playstation","13":"tag-sony","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}