PlayStation’s Live Service Plans in Disarray After Destiny 2 Shutdown

Let’s be blunt: Sony may have won the console war against Xbox this generation, but internally, the company is wrestling with a serious identity crisis. Its aggressive push into the live service market has been a string of high-profile failures, and the final nail in the coffin may be the quiet death of its most storied live service title. The situation is, frankly, embarrassing.

Bungie has confirmed that development on Destiny 2 will stop after a final June update, with all future expansions canceled. This ends an 11-year saga with no Destiny 3 in sight. Neither Bungie nor Sony had a clear plan for keeping the game alive after The Final Shape, which led to a massive player exodus. Even during its worst content drought, Destiny 2 still maintained over 150,000 daily players, making the decision to kill it now,without a sequel greenlit,seem either shortsighted or deeply misguided. It’s uncertain if a third entry will ever materialize.

Bungie was originally tasked with advising other Sony studios on building live service games, but that guidance yielded little. The most infamous example was Bungie explaining to Naughty Dog exactly what it would take to sustain a live service like the planned Factions game. Naughty Dog ultimately decided that wasn’t the kind of commitment they wanted to make, and the project was scrapped.

Then there’s Concord, arguably the largest video game launch disaster of all time. After hundreds of millions of dollars and years of production, the game barely attracted 800 concurrent players on Steam. Sony reportedly believed it would be their next big IP. It was pulled from sale after just two weeks.

The live heist shooter Fairgame$ was announced in 2023 and has since gone completely dark. Studio head Jade Raymond left some time ago, and recent reports suggest the project may be pivoting toward extraction shooter mechanics. Many are surprised the game is still in development at all.

Sony also unveiled Horizon: Hunter’s Gathering three months ago, a co-op live game that reimagines Horizon heroes in a cartoonish style. It’s currently in closed alpha, but the reception has been nearly universally negative. It’s a clear example of players not wanting a live multiplayer version of a beloved single-player franchise.

A God of War multiplayer game was in the works at Bluepoint Studios, but it was canceled due to lack of confidence in the project. Bluepoint itself was shut down entirely three months ago.

One franchise that has handled multiplayer well is Ghost of Tsushima, whose sequel Ghost of Yotei includes a Legends expansion. These cooperative modes are excellent but were never designed as ongoing live services. No new content is planned for Legends going forward.

Helldivers 2, Sony’s biggest live service success, has stabilized at roughly 10% of its launch player count from two years ago. That’s still respectable, but it’s far from the blockbuster it once was. More importantly, its developer Arrowhead is not a Sony studio and will self-publish its next game, meaning Sony can’t rely on them much longer.

That leaves Marathon, Bungie’s extraction shooter that launched three months ago. With Destiny 2 dead, Marathon is now Sony’s highest-profile first-party live service game. And it’s underperforming. Its peak Steam concurrents hit 88,000 at launch, but it’s now hovering around 10,000 to 11,000,lower than Destiny 2 during its content drought. Sony continues to publicly support Marathon and is shifting more Destiny developers to the project. The game plans to add PvP and PvE modes, and those who play it acknowledge its quality as a PvPvE extraction title. But not enough people are playing it, especially now that it’s expected to carry Bungie and serve as Sony’s flagship live service offering.

Sony’s core strength,single-player story games,remains intact. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is coming from Naughty Dog, and Insomniac’s long-awaited Wolverine game is scheduled for this year. Sony is also positioning itself as the go-to platform for the console-exclusive GTA 6 this fall, leveraging a broad hardware base, a marketing deal, and the powerful but expensive PS5 Pro.

The live service push has been nothing short of a disaster, with its only real success coming from a game not even made by a Sony studio. Too much weight now rests on Marathon, and the other projects in development don’t inspire confidence,some may never even see release. It remains to be seen how far Sony is willing to go down this road.