Sony Doubles Down on Live Service Games After Concord

Sony has looked at the smoking crater where its live service strategy used to be and decided the fix is more live service. That is the blunt takeaway from a recent Famitsu interview with Hideaki Nishino, CEO and president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, who confirmed the company has no intention of backing away from a genre that spent the past two years embarrassing it. You would be forgiven for assuming the opposite. After cancelling eight of the twelve live service games it had originally lined up for 2025, and after watching Concord become one of the fastest flameouts in modern PlayStation history, a more cautious read of the room felt inevitable. Sony reached a very different conclusion.

Nishino's framing leans hard on scale. "We believe that live service games are content that attracts users on a global level, so we want to continue to revitalize the market through both first-party and third-party content," he told Famitsu, in a machine-translated quote. He added that Sony is "not only focusing on promoting new releases, but also considering what we can do with older titles in the medium to long term." Pressed on whether the company really means to keep chasing those ambitions, he did not flinch: "That's right."

The wreckage behind the optimism

Remember what Sony is being so brave about here. Concord launched in August 2024, sold catastrophically, and was pulled from sale within roughly two weeks, refunds issued and servers switched off. Firewalk, the studio behind it, was shut down outright. That was the loud failure. The quiet one is arguably worse. Of the dozen or so live service projects Sony had penciled in for 2025, eight were cancelled before they ever reached a player. Then 2026 arrived with the decision to wind down Destiny 2, a game I would have called one of the most successful live service products on the market not long ago. Most of the people who built and maintained it are now out of a job.

"Relatively new" is doing a lot of work

One line from Nishino deserves a harder look. He described live service as a genre that is "relatively new," arguing that "many people are trying various things" and that Sony wants to "continue to take on challenges within that context." Relatively new is generous. Fortnite's battle royale mode arrived in 2017, which makes the modern live service template close to nine years old. In an industry that reinvents itself every console cycle, that is not youthful. It is established, well understood, and already crowded with entrenched winners. Treating it as an open frontier in 2026 is how you spend hundreds of millions launching a hero shooter into a market that already had Overwatch, Valorant, Apex Legends, and Marvel Rivals.

There is also an internal tension here that Sony would rather you skip past. Back in 2025, the company's CFO Lin Tao admitted the live service push was "not entirely going smoothly," and concluded that Sony "should learn the lessons from mistakes and make sure that we introduce live service content where there's less waste and it's more smooth." She pointed to Destiny 2 as proof these games could still be winners. That claim has aged like warm milk. Destiny 2 has since been wound down and its team gutted, so the reassurance now reads like a tombstone. The CEO's response to a strategy his own CFO called wasteful is, apparently, to keep going.

Highguard and the "five Concords" joke

If you want a fresher data point, Highguard supplies one. The live service shooter went up and came down almost immediately, surviving days rather than months. Players turned it into a punchline, branding it "Concord 2" and joking that its entire lifespan added up to roughly five Concords. The mockery is cruel, and it lands precisely because it keeps happening. Each of these games shows up with a slick trailer, a roster of quirky characters nobody asked for, and a monetization plan drawn up long before anyone confirmed there was an audience. Then it dies, and the next one is already deep in production.

Live service is not the villain. The factory is.

The easy narrative needs some pushback, though. Live service as a model is not the problem, and pretending otherwise ignores the games that make it sing. A well-built live service can be one of the best things in the medium, a world you return to for years instead of a weekend. I have argued exactly that about Elden Ring Nightreign, a game whose structure carries real long-term potential when it is treated as a living thing rather than a spreadsheet. The model isn't broken. The way Sony keeps using it is.

The actual failure is industrial. Sony's habit has been to mass-produce live service titles as if they were interchangeable, stamping out games full of soulless, badly written characters and bolting on microtransaction systems engineered to take far more than they give. Concord did not crater because live service is doomed. It cratered because nobody fell in love with it, and you cannot run a years-long service on a cast the audience forgot before the trailer ended. Highguard did not collapse because the genre is exhausted. It collapsed because it brought nothing new to a saturated space while demanding to be paid like it had.

So Sony's plan is to keep sending these games over the top, one after another, into an industry that has gotten very good at gunning them down. A version of this strategy does work, and it starts with making fewer games people actually want to live inside, not more games designed to monetize them on the way out the door. Nishino is betting the next one will be different. On the current evidence, the smarter wager is that it won't be, at least not until Sony stops mistaking volume for vision.