This year marked the original PlayStation's 30th anniversary, an era that took Sony from a distant outsider to the top dog in the games industry. However, 2024 also marked some of PlayStation's biggest failures, showing that the platform holder may have to change its approach if it hopes to see 40.
In this generation, we've watched Sony lean into premium. High-cost peripherals like PSVR 2, PlayStation Portal, DualSense Edge, and PS5 Pro have gone against the grain of the cost-of-living crisis. And, by focusing on live service games and AAA single-player, Sony has demanded big wins from its developers. This year, that strategy led to outsize successes and significant failures, and the developers bore the brunt of the losses.
However, in 2024, we also saw signs of a new era for PlayStation that may bear fruit in 2025. Certainly, if there's one thing we can expect in the next 12 months, it's to see how Sony plans to end this generation of consoles.
Terminal velocity
In 2022, after seeing the success of Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone, with their millions of playing and paying customers, Sony revealed plans to launch 12 live service games by April 2026. However, the strategy has had wildly mixed results.
On the one hand, you have Helldivers 2. Released at the start of February, this co-op shooter became PlayStation's fastest-selling game of all time, shifting 12 million copies in its first three months, and closed the year by winning both Best Multiplayer Game and Best Ongoing Game at The Game Awards. It would seem to vindicate Sony's pivot toward live service games. But, then, that would be ignoring the elephant weighing down the other hand.
After spending eight years and millions of dollars developing live-service hero shooter Concord, Firewalk Studios released the game on August 23. Two weeks later, because of its miserable player numbers, Sony took Concord offline, delisted it from storefronts, and refunded players. A month later, it shut down the studio, making it one of the shortest-lived online games ever released and one of the biggest flops in the industry's history.
There were already hints that Sony was getting cold feet when, in 2023, president Hiroki Totoki told investors just six games would be launched on schedule, as the others had "not been able to meet the gamers' expectations." Since then, Sony has canceled at least one of those titles: The Last of Us multiplayer game.
However, it's pushing ahead with two big live service releases in 2025. Bungie's new PvPvE shooter Marathon, Haven Studio's competitive heist game Fairgame$. Meanwhile, Destiny 2, which previously received yearly expansions, is switching to a faster cadence of smaller seasonal releases.
It's worth highlighting the pressure on Bungie right now. Since Sony acquired the studio for $3.6 billion in 2022, it's laid off more than 300 staff members and plans to move 150 workers to other publisher teams. And if there's one thing Sony showed its studios in 2024, it's how brutal it can be in responding to failure.
Firewalk and Bungie weren't the only casualties of the past 12 months. Sony laid off 900 staff across its teams in February, closing its 22-year-old London Studio. And, on the same day it closed Firewalk, Sony shuttered mobile developer Neon Koi.
Solo and smaller
It's not all live service games on Sony's 2025 docket. Major single-player games are coming to the PS5, such as Kojima's open-world deliver- 'em-up Death Stranding 2 and Sucker Punch's samurai sequel Ghost of Yotei. And, as Sony recently told investors, it plans to "continue releasing major single-player game titles every year".
We're already seeing some of those games break cover, with Naughty Dog revealing its sci-fi bounty hunter game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, at The Game Awards and reports that God of War creator Santa Monica Studio is at work on an entirely new property. Meanwhile, Sony also confirmed its plans to buy Elden Ring developer FromSoftware's parent company, Kadokawa.
However, a growing challenge facing publishers across the industry is the sheer cost of making a AAA game. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 cost three times as much as the first game, with its upcoming sequel and Marvel's Wolverine set to cost even more.
"The entry costs for making a AAA game is in triple-digit millions," former SIE Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden told an audience at Gamescom Asia in October. "We're seeing a collapse of creativity in games today with studio consolidation and the high cost of production."
We're seeing hints that Sony is trying to recreate the old AA market of smaller first-party games. In 2024, one of Sony's big successes was the comparatively pint-sized Astro Bot. This joy-filled platformer falls far below the scale of AAA, yet it became one of the highest-reviewed and most-talked-about games of the year.
New hardware on the horizon
Despite the cost, Sony has filled this generation with technology that takes the PS5 in different directions. In 2023, it released both the PSVR 2 virtual reality headset and its streaming handheld, the PlayStation Portal. Then, earlier this year, it launched the PS5 Pro, a mid-generation upgrade that doubled down on the commitment to high-fidelity gaming.
However, while Sony is great at launching high-end hardware, it is less good at supporting it post-launch. Very few first-party games have been released for the PSVR 2, with only The Midnight Walk announced for release in 2025.
The PS5 Pro is better supported, with more than 50 games enhanced to take advantage of the hardware's power, but there needs to be many more to justify the price ($699.99 / £699.99) of the console. We may also see previously enhanced games improve as Sony updates technology like PSSR, its AI-upscaling solution.
While it won’t be ready for release next year, Bloomberg reports Sony is working on a handheld that can natively play PS5 games. If that console is a few years away, now's the time for Sony to start fostering smaller studios making smaller games. In the PlayStation Vita days, Sony successfully identified small studios and supported them as they learned their craft. For instance, Little Nightmares' creator, Tarsier, started out working on LittleBigPlanet's handheld adaptations.
A new generation of handhelds that play PS5 games could be just the ecosystem Sony needs to create a market for smaller-budget games on its devices.
Even after 30 years in the business, the last 12 months showed how much Sony knows and doesn't know. Sony recognized Arrowhead and Team Asobi as small teams capable of making multi-million-selling games - games that showcase the best of PlayStation. However, it also highlighted that it's just as capable of failure, greenlighting, and investing in games that can't find a market.
2025 will show if Sony has learned any lessons from this year. Whatever the case, as we've seen consistently through the past year, the developers pay for those mistakes.
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