
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:
- The Last of Us Multiplayer — Cancelled in December 2023
- Marvel's Spider-Man: The Great Web — Cancelled on unknown date but part of Insomniac hack in December 2023
- London Studio Live Service Game — Cancelled and developer closed in February 2024
- Twisted Metal — Cancelled in February 2024
- Helldivers 2 — Released in February 2024
- Payback Project from Bungie — Cancelled in August 2024
- Concord — Released in August 2024 but taken offline forever after just two weeks
- Live Service Game from Bend Studio — Cancelled in January 2025
- Live Service God of War Game from Bluepoint — Cancelled in January 2025
- Fairgame$ — Announced in May 2023, still in production
- Marathon — Announced in May 2023, still in production
- Horizon Online — Unannounced but a widely rumoured project
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.