“With its blockbuster bubble at risk of collapsing as budgets begin to outpace the growth of sales, it’s clear where Sony’s live service obsession for the PS5 and the future of PlayStation comes from.”
We knew this. This article isn’t saying anything new.
People have a limited amount of luxury spending though, so you really can’t afford to be a live service machine. Limit the number of games across different genres.
With single player games, just make simple games. If Housemarque can make games like Resogun/SSDHD and go to something bigger like Returnal, I don’t see why the opposite is not allowed. We have very high expectations for studios like Naughty Dog, but frankly, I would vastly prefer to see them explore something simpler with a lighter budget than keep putting out remasters and remakes.
We’re reaching an impasse it seems: do we continue to demand these big single player experiences? If so, will people continue to support them? What happens if just one of these massive games fails/underperforms? Are we willing to tolerate a price increase to ease the sales requirements for a successful product? Do we tolerate ads/in-game product placements? What about full endings as paid DLC? More microtransactions? Release broken/bad games now and fix it based on buy-in later?
By comparison, the GaaS route seems to be the most innocuous. Sony deserves some credit, though their big mistake was asking Naughty Dog to try their hand at it. In hindsight, they actually seemed to have a finger on the pulse with imperfect execution. Having live service-specific studios work on that with the single player game studios doing their thing is perhaps the best approach.
Where they messed up was having too many of these GaaS games in a single showing without any new games from their veteran studios and too many in a shooter/team shooter format. 3-5 new live service games with very different themes will probably go further in getting you a diverse swath of customer engagement, but it they’re functionally similar, you’re not going to get the engagement you want.
Really I worry that people will want too much without empathy for the devs (not the corporate factor, but the labour). It pains me to say it, but…AI support for development might be the answer. I really hope we get some VERY strict regulations around AI and it is embraced exclusively as a support tool and not a replacement. The potential is there and it really could be a game changer in positive ways, but with the fossils making the rules and them being easily bought, I don’t trust them to do right by people.
Sigh…
