It seems that in the end PlayStation learned its lesson and will finally abandon its approach to games as a service after the enormous failure that was Concord. After all, not only did it not sell, but the reception was so bad that it couldn’t even stay alive for more than two weeks after its release.
Now we see the result of this enormous setback with the news that the company canceled several of the games as a service that its studios were working on. Although it sounds good, what does this news really mean?
PlayStation will finally stop betting so heavily on games as a service
It should be noted that although Concord was able to put the final nail in the coffin of PlayStation games as a service, the change was really noticeable beforehand. In fact, in the past we received news of cancellations of different titles with this scheme from different studios belonging to Sony.
From IPs that would be new to Twisted Metal as a service. Among the most talked about we also have the cancellation of Insomniac’s Spider-Man: The Great Web and the long-awaited The Last of Us: Factions 2. Which already signaled a change in the strategy that began under the command of Jim Ryan.
Source: Insomniac
Now with the cancellation of the God of War game as a service, this complete turn of the helm on the part of PlayStation and its studios seems to have been cemented. Perhaps now they could get back to doing what they do best rather than chasing declining trends within a highly saturated market.
Hundreds of other titles apart from Concord have already shown it, such as Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones recently. The audience no longer wants games as a service and very few actually manage to remain relevant for more than a few months.
If we already have such a saturated market where very few take off, what was in your mind that having all your studios working on games of this type was a good idea?
These games took up a lot of Sony’s time and resources
Naughty Dog already said it when they canceled Factions 2. Making a game as a service would require a lot of investment of time and personnel, so they would leave any other project behind. Surely the new heads at PlayStation saw the same thing with their other studios and decided to back down. Although maybe it was too late.
After all, several of its studios will have to start from scratch in creating new single-player experiences, which is really what the brand has become so well known for in its now 30 years of existence. Unfortunately we live in a time where developments are taking longer and longer. Even the smallest games take 3-4 years to create.
Source: Sony.
Naughty Dog already showed Intergalactic which is supposedly in development since 2020 and yet we don’t know when it could arrive. Probably until 2026. So the drought of brand new games from Sony’s first-party studios will continue, either until the last years of this generation or even until we see the arrival of the PlayStation 6.
There is still some hope for PlayStation but it will take a while to arrive
Another complication of the current video game market is that video game budgets reach exorbitant amounts that put more pressure on generating sales or getting them from other sources. That is why we find the increasingly frequent ports to PC as well as the already much-rejected remasters that have plagued this generation of PlayStation.
Source: Sony.
Sadly for those who are already fed up with these, we will surely continue to see them. Especially now that one of its presidents indicated that remasters help bring the biggest titles to the market. Although there are rumors that after the success of Astro Bot they will focus on smaller games from forgotten IPs to release between their big releases, they will also take their time.
Unfortunately it seems that this generation will never escape the accusations of being unnecessary
While we are glad that PlayStation has already stopped its aggressive push towards video games as a service, we are also worried that they will no longer do much for this generation of the PS5. No matter how quick studios are to make a new game after cancellations, it probably won’t be until 2027 or 2028 when we see Sony return to what they’re known for.
Fuente: PlayStation
While those years arrive, we will only have to take advantage of our PlayStation 5 with third-party experiences and what they can do to take advantage of this generation. Even so, it seems that the PS5 will go down in history as one of the most controversial, if not most unnecessary, generations of Sony’s console in its history. All because of a strategy that did not bring them the results they expected.
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