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, Jim Ryan stepped down as head of PlayStation. 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 extravagant failure of shooter Concord, which was closed just two weeks after release, for a long time remains the most significant fiasco of Sony.

Not to mention the cancellation of The Last of Us multiplayer game, on which Sony and Naughty Dog spent a huge amount of resources and time, as well as the problematic development of shooter Marathon from Bungie, which is still unknown how it will end.

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