Jim Ryan's strategy has been a failure: Sony's reliance on service games has been shown to be unsustainable
In April 2024, after 30 years at Sony Corporation, PlayStation chief Jim Ryan has left his post: a new era has begun at Sony. It was he who defined the vector of development of the brand for many years, and certainly did a lot for its popularisation and prosperity.
However, Jim Ryan had a conviction that the future of the gaming industry is for service games, and Sony needs to strengthen this direction even at the cost of reducing the number of single-player projects.
This position caused a lot of discussions and was often called wrong, and although this strategy has not been fully implemented yet, we can already talk about its failure and even, perhaps, complete failure.
Here's What We Know
Blogger Michael has compiled a visual list of all publicly known games that have already been released or are in development. Not all of them are officially announced, in such cases, information about them came from insiders, as, for example, about the multiplayer project in the Horizon universe.
The table turned out to be disappointing: only baseball simulator MLB The Show and cooperative shooter Helldivers 2 can be considered successful, and all other projects are either cancelled or considered a failure. Recall the Its life was bright but short: Sony's failed shooter Concord is officially dead, which was closed just two weeks after release, for a long time remains the most significant fiasco of Sony.
Not to mention the Insider: Naughty Dog has cancelled development of a multiplayer project based on The Last of Us universe, and will use the materials created in the full-fledged third part of the series, on which Sony and Naughty Dog spent a huge amount of resources and time, as well as the Insider: Bungie is facing serious problems in the development of shooter Marathon - the game may not even be released in 2025 from Bungie, which is still unknown how it will end.
Entering into the PS5 console generation, Sony CEO Jim Ryan set out on a mission to invest deeply into live services, here's how that has gone thus far: pic.twitter.com/5MRJ8B7NtH
- Michael (@LegacyKillaHD) September 7, 2024
Obviously, Jim Ryan made a big mistake by betting on service games. It seems that by the time Sony's lagging projects (not yet cancelled) are released, the trend for them will finally die down. Hopefully, the new PlayStation management will draw conclusions from the startegic blunders and rectify the situation in time.
Source: X
