The veteran, who is leaving Sony after 31 years, says Sony has no intention of pushing the development of live service titles.

Remember what Sony said a few years ago under Jim Ryan? Twelve live service projects were planned, some were canceled (The Last of Us Online was one of them) and some were released and then failed after a short time (Concord). Despite this, PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst is not pushing Sony studios to use this model.

Shuhei Yoshida, who was Hulst’s predecessor, recently spoke on the Sacred Symbols podcast about the infamous Live Service plan, which has yet to produce any tangible results. Yoshida says that when studios see that the company has a big initiative, they have a better chance of getting their projects accepted and supported. As for The Last of Us Online, Yoshida said that he played with it and liked it. However, after talking to Bungie, Naughty Dog realized that they couldn’t support this project at the same time they were working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, the new IP.

According to Yoshida, The Last of Us Online was Naughty Dog’s idea, so they really wanted to do it, but after Bungie explained to them what they needed to do for live service games, the studio realized that it wasn’t sustainable, so they canceled the project for their single-player sci-fi game because they didn’t see it coming. By the way, there was another live service game that was canceled: it was tied to God of War, and Bluepoint Games was working on it.

Sony has had one successful Live Service game so far. It was Helldivers II, but it wasn’t made by Sony either, it was developed by Arrowhead Game Studios, and they’re not part of PlayStation Studios!

Source: WCCFTech