To say it’s hard to keep a live-service game afloat these days would be a massive understatement. Developers across the games industry have tried to put their own spin on ongoing multiplayer games, hoping to either bring something new to the space or just achieve some fraction of the success of games like Fortnite. That’s turned out disastrously for most, and for Sony, which has gone all-in on live-service games in the past couple years, a string of failures has led even a former head of PlayStation Studios to seemingly lose faith in the publisher.
“A live-service game to me isn’t really a game,” Shawn Layden, former PlayStation Studios CEO, told The Ringer. “It’s a repetitive action engagement device.”
