Reacting to Sony's floundering push into making live-service games, Larian Studios and Baldur's Gate 3's director of publishing Michael 'Cromwelp' Douse argues that the gap between single-player and multiplayer games has never been smaller, so maybe these companies don't need to make an always-online game to have an online hit.
For context, this week Sony shut down Bluepoint Games, the PlayStation first-party studio behind the gorgeous Demon's Souls PS5 remake and Shadow of the Colossus' PS4 revival. The subsidiary had previously been working on a God of War live service game that eventually went nowhere, which is a trend often repeated elsewhere in the PlayStation Studios roster during its PS5 generation.
"Theory: because of how connected everyone is, pretty much every game and every experience is a shared experience," Douse tweets in response to Sony's multiple live service blunders during the PS5 generation, Concord included. "In other words, the distance between single and multiplayer games is actually shrinking rather than growing. Social resonance doesn't require a game to be MP."
After one commenter points out that big publishers can't monetize single-player games with endless cosmetics, Douse replies that it's "demonstrably true that you can monetize a game by, you know, making sure it's good." Look no further than Baldur's Gate 3, I guess. Though, he also says "nearly 100% of the time," he sees executives wrongly believing that no game can be "objectively good."
Bluepoint Games made a name for itself with a string of quality remasters, remakes, and repackages for classic games. The Texas-based studio was then acquired by Sony in 2021 before helping develop God of War Ragnarok alongside Sony Santa Monica, at which point it was then apparently handed a multiplayer God of War game, a project well outside of its wheelhouse. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports the team spent the last year pitching other projects.
