PlayStation spent years building up its brand as the premiere home for big, AAA, story-driven blockbusters, and to say that its big pivot to live-service gaming has been met with skepticism would be a massive understatement. Shawn Layden, who served as head of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios from 2014 through 2019, is among the skeptics – in fact, he doesn't believe live-service titles are real games at all.
"A live-service game to me isn't really a game. It's a repetitive action engagement device," Layden tells The Ringer.
"For me, a game – because of where I come from – means I need three things. I need a story, I need a character, and I need a world. And Horizon, God of War, and Uncharted have all three of those things. If you’re doing a live-service game, you just need a repetitive action that most people can get their head around, an ability to communicate in that world with other like-minded people, and [the player's] desire to do it again and again and again."
Layden says that live-service gaming is "not my skillset," and Sony's pressure to deemphasize single-player titles is part of why he left the company in 2019. Ironically, Helldivers 2 – which Layden himself takes credit for greenlighting before his departure – has proven to be PlayStation's only unequivocal live-service success in recent years. (Furthering that irony is the fact that developer Arrowhead aims to fully self-fund its next game.)
In Layden's mind, the push for live-service gaming is a "siren’s call" for publishers. "It's like a mirage on the top of a sand dune," he says. "You pursue it. You can't quite get there. Or if you do get there, what you brought to the party no one wants to play anyway."
Sony's own The Last of Us Online game is one example of a title that couldn't quite get there, and you can easily point to Concord as an example of one that nobody – or, more fairly, not enough people – wanted to play. Current SIE CEO Hermen Hulst says the publisher is now investing in "much more rigorous and more frequent testing."
"The highway is littered with people wanting to take on Fortnite, with people trying to do Overwatch with different skins," Layden says. He adds, "If you're trying to go into that space because you have this illusion in your mind of big sacks of money coming every day for the rest of your life, for most it doesn’t happen."
We'll soon see if Bungie's Marathon can turn Sony's live-service fortunes around, but it's going to take serious work to tear people away from the best online games they're already playing.
