Highlights
- Sony has delayed half of the 12 PlayStation live service games that it planned to release by March 2026.
- The delays appear to be related to quality concerns. Exactly which projects were postponed is unclear.
- Only two of Sony's dozen upcoming live service games have been confirmed to date: Bungie's Marathon and The Last of Us multiplayer spin-off.
Sony has delayed half a dozen PlayStation games that were originally planned to hit the market over the next two and a half years. The newly postponed titles are all part of the double-digit batch of Sony's live service games that the company first confirmed in February 2022.
Back then, the gaming giant said it was looking to put out at least ten titles utilizing the games-as-a-service (GAAS) business model by the end of its fiscal year 2025, which ends in March 2026. PlayStation Studios Head Hermen Hulst later mentioned that the company's near-term GAAS roadmap expanded to 12 titles as of October 2022, while also promising that these abundant PlayStation live service games will all come to PC on day one.
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The number of those planned releases has now seemingly been halved, as suggested by Sony Group COO Hiroki Totoki during the company's latest earnings call. While the official avoided using the word "delay" outright, he said that Sony is currently in the process of figuring out when to release half of the GAAS titles from the initially promised batch. Meanwhile, Totoki committed to launching the remaining six games by early 2026, VGC reports. His remarks hence indicate there have been some changes to the original plan to release all 12 of the upcoming live service games in the next two and a half years.
Exactly which titles from the company's first big GAAS batch ended up being postponed is unclear, as most of them haven't even been announced as of today. The only two live service titles that Sony has confirmed to date are Naughty Dog's The Last of Us multiplayer spin-off and Bungie's extraction shooter Marathon. Totoki implied that these delays were brought about by standards concerns, highlighting how Sony should not compromise "game quality" as part of its GAAS foray.
In spite of this setback, the gaming giant's overall strategy remains unchanged, with Totoki confirming that live service games remain an integral part of Sony's long-term plans. PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan previously said that the company doesn't intend to pursue GAAS offerings at the expense of its AAA single-player experiences, but in addition to them.
Whether such ambitious diversification is feasible without more major acquisitions in the vein of the 2022 Bungie deal remains to be seen. After all, offering long-term support for a live service game is often as challenging as developing it in the first place, if not more so. As evident by the fact that Blizzard's own president is nowadays saying players lack patience, even companies with much more GAAS experience than Sony sometimes struggle with meeting the fans' quality and quantity expectations.
