Playstation's Ill-Advised Investment in online Service Games as a Harbinger of the dark future ahead for GAAS.

[Osiris397]

If rumors are to be believed Playstation has squandered over a BILLION DOLLARS on games the Playstation gaming community would have essentially viewed radioactive if released at any point in the last 7-8 years, but there's a lot more to this and the long history of failure with GAAS.

There is no successful live services sector of gaming there’s a handful of successful games (and that’s being generous.) It’s been the case that the few successful service games are outnumbered by the unsuccessful ones by exponential factors since well before Sony sent itself careening into failure with it’s ill-advised live service agenda, hence the need for all their public defending of live-service…the cloak and dagger organizational “streamlining” and railroading of certain executives that most certainly would not have gone along with it.

Consider a single minuscule VR case of a failed live service PSVR game almost fully funded by PlayStation, Megalith. The game looked good, it was polished butch had few levels, playable characters and enemies. Initially it attracted players, however before the end of it as I recall the rancor the few fans had for the openly greedy publishers/devs in their discord left every one bitter and eroded the user base to zero in like under a week from what I could tell. That was 5-6 years ago and a drop in the bucket. Disruptive games went on to build Godfall and relatively recently announce significant layoffs.

One larger industry long term problem with these GAAS games as a a games initiative, not only is that once the franchise is built exclusively as a GAAS product that runs it’s course the publisher typically kills it and the game vanishes like it never existed, but also it will NEVER be able to come back, like Overwatch. Blizzard learned the hard way with Overwatch 2. Beyond that industry wide irreparable and ultimately fatal reputational harm to ANY FRANCHISE THAT REMOTELY LOOKS OR PLAYS LIKE IT is also doomed because of the player perception of GAAS as predatory. Sony’s wasted $300M-$400M on Concord plus other recently canceled GAAS attest to that.

Consider that the Overwatch Beta, a product that wasn’t yet made available to the public won GOTY in 2016…9 years ago. Uncharted 4 was also a nominee. Overwatch is a worthless franchise and Activision will never be able rejuvinate, they will never be able to build spin-offs from it, Overwatch will never be a trans media product. All of these things that will never happen with Overwatch will and are happening with Uncharted and it will continue to generate hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in revenue for Sony going far into the future.

This franchise erosion aspect of GAAS is a problem for which there will likely be many business case studies made in the future around the question of whether the short term success of the one in a million GAAS game success is worth any investment to any party involved.

 

[Shagger]

Correct. The industry saw a handful of GAAS achieve massive success, like Fortnite, Overwatch and so on, and all tried to copy it without any real understanding of why these games got so succesul in the first place. For example, there only being a few of them was one the reasons, so saturating the market was a huge mistake on it's own. People come back to these kinds of games and get very monogamous, so lazily rushing out a copycat was never going to work. Now everyone hates GAAS because of the sheer number of those shitty copycats have completely ruined the reputation of these games. I don't blame Sony for testing these waters, but they've done the right thing by choosing not to swim in them.

 

[Scarletioshub]

You raise strong points about the high failure rate of GAAS games. While a few succeed, most fade quickly, damaging both the franchise and publisher. Games like Megalith and Godfall show how initial interest can drop, leaving little chance for revival. Sony's investment in GAAS titles like Concord and their cancellations highlight the risks. The long-term reputational damage might not be worth the short-term gains for these types of projects.

 

[Osiris397]

... Games like Megalith and Godfall show how initial interest can drop, leaving little chance for revival. Sony's investment in GAAS titles like Concord and their cancellations highlight the risks. The long-term reputational damage might not be worth the short-term gains for these types of projects.

I guess the thing that vexes me about these decisions is that just planning to build campaigns for these games and leaving the MP/Co-Op as separate components would result in fewer of these being made and would exponentially increase the salability of the games, but oh, no they just want to go straight to extracting as much as possible which creates the public animosity and vitriol. If Concord had a COD like campaign I would totally buy that game.