PlayStation boss Herman Hulst has said that live service failures are good for the development of their future attempts.
One of Sony‘s first major pushes into the live service space was Concord, and for those of you who managed to miss out on the fiasco, it was pulled offline after two weeks of being out, and not long later Sony killed the game and the studio behind it, meaning that the eight years of development time were basically for nothing. Concord was not a bad game, it was well made and relatively bug free, but various factors (bad marketing, a paid title in a genre full of great free ones, bit generic) led to it being a disaster that makes the original Cyberpunk 2077 launch look tame.
And yet, PlayStation are unfazed, with development of live service titles going forward. Marathon is next in line and from the sounds of things, it isn’t going swimmingly over there either.
Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Herman Hulst spoke to the Financial Times (in a paywalled article that has been recapped by Genki on Twitter) about Concord’s failure and Sony’s continued push to live service despite it. Hulst says the fiasco has led Sony to “put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing.” He adds, “The advantage of every failure is that people now understand how necessary” oversight is.
Hulst also added, “I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply” which is a far cry from Concord’s eight-year development and reportedly massive budget.
But if you were hoping that failure would cause Sony to go back to doing what it does best by creating impactful single-player games, I wouldn’t get too excited. Hulst says that the number of live-service releases is not important. “What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities.”
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