PlayStation’s ongoing live-service strategy isn’t quite paying off. Concord was a historic failure, not just for PlayStation but the industry at large. The brilliant Marathon has failed to catch on with low sales, and the company has scrapped online titles for The Last of Us, God of War, and others.
Nevertheless, Sony is continuing its push on live-service, despite its undeniable failure to make a dent outside of Helldivers 2. In an interview with Famitsu, president Hideaki Nishino confirmed that they will continue to focus on live-service titles following disaster after disaster.
On the other hand, former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden explained the importance of continuing to provide players with strong single-player games. While live-service has the potential to earn a lot of money, single-player games continue to keep players interested in gaming.
“I firmly believe that single-player, narrative-driven gaming is here to stay,” Layden told YouTube channel PSI. “It’s how we built this business. That’s what sustains it.”
Layden explained that great single-player games aren’t really enjoyed in a vacuum like many executives may assume. “It’s a type of game where you can enjoy it by yourself and talk to friends about it. Maybe there’s multiplayer, maybe there isn’t. But, I think, essentially most of our gaming experiences as when we allow ourselves to be immersed in that world, with that character, to learn that story. More so than I got online with a bunch of friends and we played team deathmatch.”
With that said, Layden believes that AAA single-player games do need to find some way to evolve again to stay relevant. “I think what we need to do is we need to come back to doing the hard work of creating new kinds of entertainment,” he said.
“Right now, you just find, you know I was at a Game Awards show and I was a bit disappointed to see that all of the games I saw at that awards presentation were either zombie apocalypse, some kind of Space Marines, guys in medieval Europe with big swords. That was so central to what everyone was building. There’s so many games that looked like the game next to it and looked like the game next to it.”
Layden argued that the industry has reached a state of stagnation creatively. “I’m concerned that, in today’s world, you know, quirky games like PaRappa the Rapper don’t get made any more… I think we’ve lost a lot of variety in games that are out there. We have: ‘This one’s a looter shooter. This one’s a hero shooter. This one’s an extraction shooter.’ Shooter, shooter, shooter. We have mountains of those, but where is the next Katamari Damacy?”
He continued: “I think, unless we broaden our offerings in the kind of games that we bring to the marketplace, I think we lost the opportunity to attract new users.”
This is true in even PlayStation’s continued slew of AAA single-player games, and fans have felt it for a while. God of War and Uncharted used to be very different genres, now they’ve coalesced into something more similar to one another. Even Spider-Man, a game that should be very different, still has sequences similar to The Last of Us. There’s an expectation of what Sony AAA games are now, and there’s seemingly a need to make sure that expectation is met.
