As long as there continues to be succesful live service games, they will never stop attempting to make new ones, because the succesful ones are the most profitable forms of entertainment ever devised.
Of course there is only room for a limited amount of live service games on the market (since gamers only have one life to waste on them), so most of them will fail, and many of them even before leaving the drawing board it seems.
This is an excellent point. An organisation the size of Sony is simply incapable of not attempting a live service hit as long as they have the resources to do so.
A smaller player can pursue a strategy where they gain profits from their (somewhat specialized) segement of the market. Sony lacks that flexibility due to their size.
But then, why do they keep canceling them before release? They don’t know if they’d have been hits or failures.
Of course we can’t really know what goes on behind the scenes. But obviously these kinds of games are designed by committee (namely board members). So every single detail is going to be dictated from above, and as new games are released by other publishers with new succesful features these dictates changes mid-production. I can’t but imagine that the development of live service games are a complete shitshow from start to finish.
So perhaps at some point they decide to get rid of the entire mess and start afresh, only for the process to beging again of course.
I’ve seen project managment in industrial fields go in circles in similar ways, and now that you put it this way I can totally see it.
Also worth noting that getting a live service game with enough infrastructure going to immediately make them millions is a significant startup cost on its own. picking the best project of them and then putting it in its own studio seems like a very smart way to do it.
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The games industry desperately needs another crash.
And the funny thing is I’d be fine with my 18 year old Steam account and 450 games (and a huge backlog).
I wish them the best flop
Devil’s advocate: they created a new studio with all the lessons and right core employees who understand the space the best.
Well atleast they are trying stuff unlike some other trillion dollar company that keeps on buying studios but still fails the make good new ip (hell! they are struggling to keep halo intact).
Funny how that almost describes several other US companies besides MS. Like Amazon keeps failing at releasing a game and when they do it’s trash. And Meta keeps losing billions in the VR space. Tech bros have no clue how the triple A gaming industry works, since games actually require creativity and you can’t simply hook people with an algorithm.
Word
Yeah, I think they made that, too
It’s even funnier the nth time!
Just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
I still read “live service” the way it’s pronounced on the jimqusition
LiVe SeRvIcE