Sony’s chief financial officer has suggested that live-service gaming hasn’t been a complete unmitigated success for PlayStation. With quite some impressive understatement, following a year that saw the overwhelming failure of Concord and serious delays to Bungie’s Marathon, CFO Lin Tao told shareholders on a Q&A call following the release of Sony’s latest financial results that “it’s not entirely going smoothly.”
She did, however, defend the company’s continued forays into the genre, pointing out that while there have been a few hundreds of millions of dollars hiccups, there have been successes too. As VGC reports, acknowledging that “somewhat negative news has been coming out,” Tao pointed out, “if we look at the past five years, five years ago live-service games were almost non-existent for PlayStation Studios. We 1754571637 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.”
Fair play on Helldivers 2. The game is listed in the latest financial report 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’s 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. MLB The Show comes out with a new edition annually, so makes for an odd “live-service” proposition, and it’s notable that Sony doesn’t include its sales in its report. Gran Turismo 7 however, launched in 2022, still receives monthly updates, so that counts.
Given rumors that Concord cost anywhere from $200 million to $400 million, and possibly made back around $1 million, it does seem like perhaps this doesn’t entirely balance the scales. But Tao makes the argument that this is still a new revenue stream that Sony didn’t have five years back, so it’s not to be sniffed at. “For Q1 the live-service ratio was about 40 percent,” VGC reports she told the call. “For the full year it’s a little less, probably between 20 to 30 percent. So in terms of the transformation, it’s not entirely going smoothly, but from a longer-term perspective, if you look at the changes over five years you see that there’s definitely been a change.”
Thankfully, Sony isn’t pretending it’s all roses. “Of course, we recognize that there are still many issues,” Tao went on to say, “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.”
This likely explains the extreme measures taken following Marathon‘s extremely badly received alpha in April this year, not risking another Concord-scale disaster so soon after. The game has since been “indefinitely” delayed, but not before it was met with plagiarism accusations. Sony also cancelled multiple live-service projects earlier this year, further casting doubt on the format as a viable medium.
Still, the company seems upbeat about the prospects! And it’s 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.