PlayStation Legend Shuhei Yoshida 'Would've Tried to Resist' Sony's Live Service Push

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has expressed his reservations about Sony’s controversial push into live service video games. Yoshida, who served as President of SIE Worldwide Studios at Sony Interactive Entertainment from 2008 to 2019, shared his views during an interview with Kinda Funny Games. He revealed that Sony was well aware of the risks associated with investing in live service games.

Yoshida's comments come at a critical juncture for PlayStation's live service titles. While Arrowhead's Helldivers 2 achieved remarkable success, selling 12 million copies in just 12 weeks and becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game ever, other live service efforts have faced significant challenges. Notably, Sony's Concord turned out to be a major disappointment, surviving only a few weeks post-launch before being taken offline due to dismal player engagement. Sony ultimately decided to terminate the game and shutter its developer.

The failure of Concord has been financially burdensome for Sony. According to a report by Kotaku, the initial development budget was around $200 million, which did not cover the complete development costs, the purchase of the Concord IP rights, or the acquisition of Firewalk Studios.

The setback with Concord followed Sony's cancellation of Naughty Dog's multiplayer game based on The Last of Us. Additionally, Sony recently canceled two other unannounced live service projects: a God of War title being developed by Bluepoint and another at Bend Studio, known for Days Gone.

In the interview, Yoshida, who left Sony after 31 years of service, reflected on the company's strategy. He suggested that if he were in the position of Hermen Hulst, the current CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment's Studio Business Group, he would have resisted the shift towards live service games. Yoshida explained that while he managed the budget, he had to allocate funds wisely between established single-player titles and the new live service ventures.

“For me, I was managing this budget, so I was responsible for allocating money to what kinds of games to make,” Yoshida said. “If the company was considering [going] that way, it probably didn’t make sense to stop making another God of War or single-player game, and put all the money into the live service games.

“However, what they did when I left and Hermen [Hulst] took over is the company gave us a lot more resources. I don’t think they told Hermen to stop making single-player games. [They said] ‘these games are great, keep doing that, and we’ll give you additional resources to work on these live service games and try it.’

“I’m sure they knew it was risky. The chance of a game becoming successful in this hugely competitive genre would be small. However, the company, knowing that risk, gave Hermen the resources and chance to try it. I think that’s the way they did it. In my mind, that’s great, and hopefully some games will become successful.

“Luckily, Helldivers 2 did so well. Nobody expected that. So you can’t plan a success in this industry. That’s the most fun part of this business. I hope that this strategy will work in the end. If I was in Hermen’s position, probably I would’ve tried to resist that direction. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they removed me from the first-party!”

During a recent financial call, Sony president, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totoki acknowledged the lessons learned from the contrasting fortunes of Helldivers 2 and Concord. Totoki admitted that Sony should have conducted development milestones like user testing and internal evaluations much earlier for Concord.

“Currently we are still in the process of learning,” Totoki stated. “Basically, with regards to new IP, of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for our reflection, probably we need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates, we need to bring them forward. We should have done those gates much earlier than we did.”

Totoki also pointed to Sony’s organizational structure and the timing of Concord’s release as contributing factors to its failure. Concord launched in August, shortly after the successful Black Myth: Wukong hit PS5 and PC, potentially leading to market cannibalization.

“We have a siloed organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother,” Totoki said.

“And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches.”

In the same financial call, Sony senior vice president for finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa compared the launches of Helldivers 2 and Concord, emphasizing the importance of sharing insights across the company.

“We launched two live service games this year,” he said. “Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, while Concord ended up being shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both.

“We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system.

“We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games — which are our strengths and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP — with live-service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.”

Looking ahead, Sony has several live service games in development, including Bungie’s Marathon, Guerrilla’s Horizon Online, and Haven Studio’s Fairgame$.