The frenzy surrounding live‑service games that has dominated the industry for much of the last ten years is now well‑documented. The belief that every title should be turned into a live‑service experience—an outright delusion that any game could be molded into that model—has drained billions of dollars, countless developer hours, and has burned through a huge amount of consumer goodwill and intellectual‑property value in a blaze of executive misjudgment.
Across the globe, the biggest publishers and platform owners spent years combing through their existing franchises and back‑catalogues, convinced that somewhere within those assets lay the next Fortnite‑style cash cow. The risk was obvious: the odds of a live‑service hit were astronomically low, yet the logic was that a single blockbuster would offset the many inevitable failures. That logic collapsed for several interrelated reasons. First, the industry over‑estimated how often live‑service games succeed, thereby understating the true risk.
Second, the market’s capacity to support several large‑scale live services at once was vastly overstated. Most importantly, there was a pervasive underappreciation of how difficult it is to run a successful live‑service title and how razor‑thin the line is between profit and player backlash. The fallout was industry‑wide.
Few companies escaped without scars, and many are still wrestling with financial crises that stem directly from over‑investment in these costly, high‑risk ventures. The tangible effects—layoffs, cancelled projects, studio shutdowns—have fallen hardest on those who had the least influence over the decisions that led to the mess. While many firms felt the tremors of the live‑service mania, one name stands out as the poster child for the era: Sony. When historians eventually write the chapter on this period, Sony will likely receive its own dedicated page.
The company’s aggressive pivot toward live services epitomizes everything that went wrong across the sector, from the bombastic promise to launch a dozen live‑service titles by March of this year to the drawn‑out humiliation of a slow strategic retreat marked by disastrous launches and project cancellations. Jason Schreier’s recent reporting on Guerrilla Games’ "Horizon Hunters Gathering"—one of the few surviving projects from that initial live‑service fervor—offers a microcosm that captures many aspects of this multi‑year blunder. More importantly, it provides a rare glimpse into the less‑obvious cost of the live‑service miscalculation: the opportunity cost that will haunt the company for years.
In short, Hunters Gathering performed so poorly in internal testing that it is being re‑engineered as a traditional multiplayer game, stripping away the live‑service components. This is not an isolated case; for instance, "Dragon Age: The Veilguard" reportedly shifted from a live‑service concept to a single‑player experience late in development.
What makes this situation extraordinary is Schreier’s claim that Guerrilla has been working almost exclusively on Hunters Gathering since finishing the DLC for "Horizon: Forbidden West." Consequently, there is currently no mainline sequel to that flagship franchise in active development at the studio. Whether Hunters Gathering ever reaches players, its true cost to Sony extends far beyond the budget allocated to it. The deeper expense is that Guerrilla, one of PlayStation’s most acclaimed first‑party studios, will not deliver a major exclusive for the PS5. "Horizon: Forbidden West" launched at the tail end of the PS4 cycle, appearing on both PS4 and PS5, and its follow‑up will likely not appear until deep into the PS6 era.
This represents a catastrophic misstep. Horizon was a massive hit for Sony, part of a slate of blockbuster first‑party titles that kept the PS4’s library fresh and demonstrated PlayStation’s ability to both launch new franchises and revive older IPs.
Yet at some point the studios that had proven expertise in crafting epic single‑player experiences were ordered from above to convert their IPs into live‑service products. The predictable failure of those attempts now means that several studios have essentially produced nothing of substance for the past half‑decade. Guerrilla is not alone. Observant gamers can spot other puzzling gaps in Sony’s release calendar and correctly infer that the live‑service push is to blame.
Naughty Dog, for example, has not released a new original title since 2020; its PS5 releases have been remasters while the studio struggled with a now‑cancelled live‑service version of "The Last of Us." (Sucker Punch, the creators of "Ghost of Yotei," and Santa Monica Studio, the home of "God of War," appear to have sidestepped this curse, and an insider account of how they did so would be fascinating.) The resulting weakening of PlayStation’s first‑party pipeline could not have come at a worse time for Sony. These opportunity costs are perfectly timed to inflict maximum damage. The meme that the PS5 lacks compelling exclusive games is now widespread. While it isn’t entirely fair—there are still plenty of titles to keep any gamer busy—the absence of key studios and franchises from the lineup is undeniable.
This perception will linger in consumers’ minds just as Sony tries to persuade them to purchase what will likely be the most expensive console in the company’s history a few years from now. Sony now appears to be in damage‑control mode, shifting back toward the development strategy that served it well during the PS4 era and attempting to salvage whatever it can from the wreckage of the live‑service experiment and the multi‑billion‑dollar Bungie acquisition that was supposed to power it. However, modern game development pipelines are long and complex.
Ironically, Sony now faces a problem similar to Microsoft’s when it entered the current generation: high‑quality game releases require planning and production that begin five years in advance, and no amount of money can instantly create a robust lineup if the work didn’t start years ago. When billions of dollars flow through the upper echelons of the games industry, it can be easy to treat strategic blunders as mere line‑items—ten million here, a hundred million there—absorbed into quarterly earnings. Opportunity cost, however, cannot be written off in an accountant’s spreadsheet. Having flagship studios waste years on a misguided side quest and miss an entire console generation does not appear as a simple expense; it erodes brand equity, damages consumer trust, and creates a lingering void that will be felt long after the cancelled live‑service title fades from memory.
In the annals of industry missteps, Sony’s ill‑judged pivot may ultimately prove to be the most costly of all, not because of the dollars spent on a single project, but because of the years of exclusive content that will never materialize, the weakened pipeline that hampers future releases, and the lasting impression on gamers that the PlayStation brand no longer guarantees the must‑play experiences it once did.