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Live-service is a gravy train Sony is continuing to strive for despite struggles. They struck gold with Helldivers 2 thanks to Arrowhead, and Sony completed their purchase of Bungie for $3.7 billion in 2022. Unfortunately, while Helldivers 2 has been a massive hit, Bungie’s Marathon has been bombarded with controversy before launch, and there was the historic failure of Concord in 2024. While a lot of PlayStation players have been hoping Sony will slow down with their pursuit of live-service glory, Sony’s CFO has outlined a commitment to the genre despite the push not “going smoothly”.
Sony CFO admits live-service push is not “entirely going smoothly”
Sony CFO, Lin Tao, recently participated in a Q&A following the company’s latest financial results as per VGC. During the Q&A session, a caller asked about Sony’s plans to continue pursuing live-service games in wake of issues experienced.
Through an interpreter, Lin Tao admitted Sony’s live-service push is “not entirely going smoothly”. The CFO cited “Last year Concord [shut down], and this year Marathon was postponed, so somewhat negative news has been coming out”.
Not only was Concord shut down last year, but it was an historical failure. Abysmally low player numbers in the open beta suggested the game would be dead on arrival, but no one expected it to be shut down just a couple of weeks after launch with Sony offering full refunds.
As for Marathon, it has been the victim of poor feedback in playtests, with Bungie telling Destiny fans it’s “probably not the game for you”. There was also controversy over stolen artwork, and the game has been delayed indefinitely with still no release date announced.
Away from Marathon, another live-service game in-development called Fairgame$ has also reportedly been delayed to 2026 following negative feedback from internal playtests.
Despite these struggles, as well as number of cancelled live-service games in-development such as The Last of Us Factions, Lin Tao remains optimistic about Sony’s live-service push.
Lin Tao said “if we look at the past five years, five years ago live service games were almost non-existent for PlayStation Studios”. Now Sony have “Helldivers 2, MLB The Show and Gran Turismo 7, and Bungie’s Destiny 2, so we have these four live services contributing to sales and profits in a stable manner.”
Regarding financials, the Sony CFO revealed that “For Q1 the live service ratio was about 40%, for the full year it’s a little less, probably between 20-30%”. While admitting that the push for live-service is “not going entirely smoothly,” there is an acknowledgement that “from a longer-term perspective, if you look at the changes over five years you see that there’s definitely been a change”.
Lastly, Lin Tao said Sony “recognise that there are still many issues, so we should learn the lessons from mistakes and make sure that we introduce live service content where there’s less waste and it’s more smooth.”
Previously, Sony has said that in their push for more live-service games they will follow the outline set by Helldivers 2. We now know Helldivers 2 is coming to Xbox consoles on August 26th, and a recent PlayStation job listing suggests more PS5 console exclusives will be brought to Xbox. We know Marathon will be available on Xbox from day-one despite Sony owning Bungie, so the speculation is that the Sony-published games on Xbox consoles will be live-service only.
In other PlayStation news, Bungie’s “independence is getting lighter” as Sony issues “structural reform” following Marathon blunders.
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