PlayStation Legend Shuhei Yoshida 'Would've Tried to Resist' Sony's Live Service Push

Shuhei Yoshida, a former PlayStation executive and President of SIE Worldwide Studios from 2008 to 2019, recently expressed his reservations about Sony's push into live service video games. In an interview with Kinda Funny Games, Yoshida revealed that Sony was aware of the risks associated with investing heavily in live service games. His comments come at a challenging time for PlayStation's live service ventures, highlighted by both successes and failures.

The success story of this period is Arrowhead's Helldivers 2, which became the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game ever, selling 12 million copies in just 12 weeks. However, not all projects fared as well. Sony's Concord turned out to be a significant disappointment, lasting only a couple of weeks before being taken offline due to extremely low player engagement. The game was eventually canceled, and its developer shut down. Reports from Kotaku indicate that the initial development deal for Concord was around $200 million, which did not cover the entire development cost or the acquisition of the IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself.

The failure of Concord followed the cancellation of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us multiplayer game. Additionally, Sony recently canceled two other unannounced live service projects, including a God of War title from Bluepoint and a game from the developers of Days Gone, Bend Studio.

Yoshida, who recently left Sony after 31 years with the company, discussed the strategic shift towards live service games during his tenure. He noted that if he had been in the position of Hermen Hulst, the current CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group, he would have resisted the move towards live service games. Yoshida explained, "For me, I was managing this budget, so I was responsible for allocating money to what kinds of games to make. 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."

He acknowledged that Sony did not abandon single-player games entirely but rather provided additional resources to explore live service games. Yoshida praised the approach, saying, "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."

Yoshida also highlighted the unexpected success of Helldivers 2, emphasizing the unpredictable nature of the gaming industry. He added, "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's president, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totoki discussed the lessons learned from both Helldivers 2 and Concord. Totoki admitted that Sony should have implemented development gates, such as user testing and internal evaluation, much earlier in the process for Concord. He stated, "Currently we are still in the process of learning. 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 pointed to Sony's "siloed organization" and the timing of Concord's release as potential factors contributing to its failure. He noted that Concord launched close to the highly successful Black Myth: Wukong, which may have led to market cannibalization. Totoki emphasized the need for better coordination across organizational boundaries and more strategic release timing to avoid such issues.

During the same financial call, Sony senior vice president for finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa compared the launches of Helldivers 2 and Concord, stating that the lessons learned would be shared across Sony's studios. He said, "We launched two live service games this year. 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."

Hayakawa outlined Sony's intention to apply these lessons to strengthen its development management system, focusing on both single-player games and live service games. He concluded, "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 Marathon by Bungie, Horizon Online by Guerrilla, and Fairgame$ by Haven Studio.