Sony admits there are 'many issues' with PlayStation's live service game strategy

Sony management doesn't try to sugar-coat the state of PlayStation's live service roadmap, admitting the company has more work to do and lessons to learn.

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Sony executives acknowledge the mistakes with PlayStation's live games, briefly mentioning the $400 million blunder Concord and discussing Marathon's delay. Multiple live games have been cancelled, including Naughty Dog's anticipated Last of Us online game; Sony originally wanted to release 12 live games by FY25 and a lot of these titles have been scrapped.

In a recent webcast with investors during Sony's Q1'25 earnings, company CFO Lin Tao says that there are "still issues, many issues" with the games-as-a-service plan. Despite the roadblocks, Sony has indeed seen success with Helldivers 2's gargantuan sales on PS5 and PC, and potentially even more when it drops on Xbox.

Check below for a transcript of what Sony's CFO said during the Q&A session:

The overall status of Marathon and our live services...

Last year, Concord [was written off] and this year, Marathon was postponed, so there's been somewhat negative news coming out.

But if you look at the past five years...five years ago live service games were almost nonexistent for PlayStation Studios. We [now] have Helldivers 2, MLB, GT7, and Bungie's Destiny 2. So we have these four live services contributing to sales and profit in a stable manner.

For Q1, live service ratio was about 40%. For the full year, it's a little less, probably 20-30%.

So in terms of the transformation [towards live services], it's not entirely going smoothly, but from a longer-term perspective, the changes over the past five years show that there's definitely been a transition.

Of course, we recognize that there are still issues, many issues, so we should learn the lessons from our mistakes and make sure we introduce live service content in a smoother way where there's less waste.