Cancelled PS5 Live Service Games Push Square

With another two of Sony's live-service PS5 games cancelled and sent to the scrapheap, PlayStation fans and games media have started to truly map out the results of the company's Games as a Service efforts, announced a few years ago. The results, outside of an unexpected Helldivers 2 success story, are incredibly damning.

In 2022, Sony announced it had 12 live-service projects from first-party and partner studios in development. In the time since then, most have been cancelled. From what we know (as Sony never publicly named them), here is what that list looks like:

Of the 12 projects, seven will already never see the light of day. Concord is already no longer playable, so you could well increase the total to eight. When a live-service title set in the God of War universe is cancelled, it's difficult to have much confidence in something like Fairgame$ making it to market either.

Sony has a handful of single player games already announced for its core userbase, including Ghost of Yotei, Death Stranding 2, Intergalactic, and Marvel's Wolverine. Besides those, however? It's very difficult to truly track what Sony developers have in the works and how into those projects they even are. Everyone assumed Bluepoint was making something in the single player realm — it wasn't.

In response to someone suggesting Sony's "tentpole slate" looking "dire" at the moment, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg responded: "Trying to make 12 live-service games will have that effect." It's possible PlayStation fanatics could be living off single player scraps for the years to come.