Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has expressed his reservations about Sony's controversial push into live service video games. Yoshida, who served as President of SIE Worldwide Studios from 2008 to 2019, shared his thoughts in an interview with Kinda Funny Games, noting that Sony was aware of the risks associated with investing in live service games.
Yoshida's comments come at a challenging time for PlayStation's live service offerings. While Arrowhead's Helldivers 2 became a massive success, selling 12 million copies in just 12 weeks and setting a record as the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game ever, other live service titles from Sony have faced significant setbacks. Notably, Sony's Concord turned out to be a major disappointment, lasting only a few weeks before being taken offline due to low player engagement. The game was ultimately canceled, and its developer was shut down.
The failure of Concord was costly for Sony, with initial development costs reportedly around $200 million, according to Kotaku. This sum did not cover the entire development process, nor did it include the acquisition of the Concord IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself. The Concord debacle followed the cancellation of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game, and Sony recently canceled two more unannounced live service projects, including a God of War title at Bluepoint and another at Bend Studio, the developer behind Days Gone.
Yoshida, who left Sony after 31 years of service, reflected on the company's strategy during his interview. He explained that if he had been in the position of Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst, he might have resisted the shift towards live service games. Yoshida was responsible for budget allocation during his tenure and believed that diverting resources from successful single-player titles to live service games was risky.
“For me, I was managing this budget, so I was responsible for allocating money to what kinds of games to make,” Yoshida said. “If the company was considering [going] that way, it probably didn’t make sense to stop making another God of War or single-player game, and put all the money into the live service games.
“However, what they did when I left and Hermen [Hulst] took over is the company gave us a lot more resources. I don’t think they told Hermen to stop making single-player games. [They said] ‘these games are great, keep doing that, and we’ll give you additional resources to work on these live service games and try it.’
“I’m sure they knew it was risky. The chance of a game becoming successful in this hugely competitive genre would be small. However, the company, knowing that risk, gave Hermen the resources and chance to try it. I think that’s the way they did it. In my mind, that’s great, and hopefully some games will become successful.
“Luckily, Helldivers 2 did so well. Nobody expected that. So you can’t plan a success in this industry. That’s the most fun part of this business. I hope that this strategy will work in the end. If I was in Hermen’s position, probably I would’ve tried to resist that direction. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they removed me from the first-party!”
In a recent financial call, Sony president, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totoki discussed the lessons learned from both the successful launch of Helldivers 2 and the failure of Concord. Totoki emphasized the need for earlier development checkpoints, such as user testing and internal evaluations, to address issues before a game's release.
“Currently we are still in the process of learning,” Totoki admitted. “Basically, with regards to new IP, of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for our reflection, probably we need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates, we need to bring them forward. We should have done those gates much earlier than we did.”
Totoki also highlighted Sony's "siloed organization" and the timing of Concord's release, which coincided with the launch of Black Myth: Wukong, suggesting that these factors may have contributed to Concord's poor performance.
“We have a siloed organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother,” Totoki said.
“And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches.”
During the same financial call, Sony senior vice president for finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa compared the launches of Helldivers 2 and Concord, indicating that the lessons learned would be shared across Sony's studios to improve future development and management processes.
“We launched two live service games this year,” he said. “Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, while Concord ended up being shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both.
“We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system.
“We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games — which are our strengths and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP — with live-service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.”
Looking ahead, several PlayStation live service games are still in development, including Bungie’s Marathon, Guerrilla’s Horizon Online, and Haven Studio’s Fairgame$.
