This Physin't What We Asked For, Sony.

Anyone who knows me knows that for the past 15 to 20 odd years of my cognitive life, I’ve been a stalwart and at times stubborn Playstation supporter, a self-procclaimed “Pony”, if you will. The very day I was born there was a Playstation in my house, which I’m sure is true for many people reading this due to the seemingly irreplicable success of the almighty Playstation 2. I think the first time I remember ever being given a console was a launch edition PS3, the fat one, the one that had backwards compatibility built into it. I still have that very same console, it’s sitting in a display case. At the time I didn’t know how divisive the PS3 actually was, I was 6 years old and the “you should want to get a second job to afford this bad boy” of it all was very much my father’s problem. To me, it was just a box under a tree that contained a console I’d spend a decade putting through its paces.

As problematic as its price tag and software-limiting architecture was, I loved that thing. I still love it. In fact, I think I’ve grown to respect it more as a piece of technology that still symbolizes Playstation’s former aspirations for excellence. It was a hard console to develop for, but the titles that worked still hold up incredibly well. Despite this, it was still damaging enough to SIE’s reputation to usher in the PS4, a savior, a titan, a competition vanquisher. Competing with the underwhelming Xbox One and Wii U, and doing anything possible to reestablish trust from its playerbase, Playstation would go on to make the PS4 unforgettable; hit after hit, for a price that was all-too attractive. Only 4 years after release you could pick up a PS4 for $200 on Black Friday deals, 9 years later and its successor has only risen from its base MSRP. While Sony is quick to blame it on rising silicon prices as AI cannibalizes the tech industry, they’re much quicker to wave their record high quarterly earnings reports in their investors' faces. Funny how that happens; it’s never been more difficult to sell consoles, but they’ve also managed to report a 59% increase in revenue against the PS4 era. 

Hardware prices aside, as people seem to largely be quite inelastic about it, the bigger issue is SIE’s software side.

In short; no one knows what the fuck is going on at SIE anymore.

That may sound overly dramatic until you actually lay everything out.

The PS5 generation began with Sony sitting on one of the strongest positions any platform holder could possibly ask for. The PS4 had been an enormous success. PlayStation had spent an entire generation cultivating an identity around big-budget, prestige single-player games. God of War, Spider-Man, Horizon, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Ghost of Tsushima, Bloodborne. Whatever your personal taste, Sony had convinced an enormous audience that buying a PlayStation meant buying into the best place in the industry for big, polished single-player experiences.

Sony looked at that success and decided it needed to become a live-service company.

The centerpiece of that strategy was the promise of twelve live-service games by the end of the fiscal year ending March 2026. Playstation (led by Jim Ryan (now retired) and Hermen Hulst (who should be voted out immediately)) wasn't content with having a few multiplayer games. It wanted a diversified portfolio of recurring-revenue games that could supposedly sit alongside its traditional single-player output and turn PlayStation into a more consistent money machine. So it started buying companies to facilitate that strategy.

Sony spent $3.6 billion acquiring Bungie in 2022, in large part because Bungie was supposed to be Sony's live-service authority. Bungie's expertise with Destiny would help Sony evaluate its upcoming multiplayer projects and avoid flooding the market with shit nobody wanted.

We are all far too familiar with how well that’s worked out.

Naughty Dog is probably the clearest example of how much damage this strategy did. The Last of Us Online (Factions?) was in development for years. What had originally been a multiplayer component of The Last of Us Part II had grown into a massive standalone project. Naughty Dog ultimately cancelled it in 2023 because supporting the game after launch would have required effectively turning Naughty Dog into a full-time live-service developer. The studio would have been spending years maintaining one game instead of making the single-player games it had built its reputation on.

Think about what that means. One of Sony's premier single-player studios spent years working on a live-service game because Sony decided it needed a live-service portfolio, only for Sony to eventually decide that perhaps Naughty Dog should go back to making the games everyone actually wanted from Naughty Dog. Those were years that can't simply be given back. We’re 7 years into the PS5 lifecycle and Sony’s premier studio hasn’t shipped a new game in 9 years, and their upcoming release, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, hasn’t been seen in 2 years.

Then there was Concord, the ultimate embodiment of everything wrong with Sony's strategy. It was a $40 hero shooter entering a market already saturated with established free-to-play giants, from Overwatch to Valorant to Apex Legends to Fortnite and Marvel’s Rivals. Sony released it in August 2024 and, almost immediately, nobody played it.

The game was pulled from sale roughly two weeks later. Players were refunded. Firewalk Studios was shut down.

A project that had consumed years of development and an enormous amount of money (estimated $400 Million) effectively ceased to exist before most people had even heard of it.

That would be embarrassing enough on its own. But Concord was supposed to be evidence that Sony's new strategy worked. Instead, it became the first of a recurring series of mistakes Sony would make again and again and again.

The original twelve-game live-service plan was eventually reduced to six. Then more and more of those projects disappeared. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Online was gone. Insomniac's Spider-Man multiplayer project disappeared. London Studio's fantasy multiplayer game disappeared alongside the studio itself. Bend's live-service project was cancelled. Bluepoint's live-service God of War project was cancelled. Other reported projects were scrapped or substantially reworked. By 2026, eight of the original twelve live-service projects had reportedly been cancelled. 

Manchester Studio was closed. Japan Studio was effectively dismantled. PixelOpus was closed. London Studio was closed. Firewalk was closed. Neon Koi was closed. Bend was hit with layoffs after its project was cancelled. Bluepoint was eventually shut down after its live-service project was cancelled. Dark Outlaw Games, another studio formed around former Bungie leadership, was itself shut down. Just this summer, Bungie’s staff was axed in half following the unceremonious ending of Destiny 2’s service.

Unfortunately, the reality of the industry, especially now, is that studios sometimes need to close, games sometimes need to be cancelled and projects sometimes need to be cancelled.

But when you look at the aggregate, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

Sony spent years telling everyone that live service was the future. Developers were reorganized around that future. Studios were acquired to support it. Billions were invested in it (by my estimation, roughly $10Bn on the low end). Developers spent years making games that were eventually cancelled. Then those games were cancelled, the studios were gutted or closed, and Sony began steering back toward the exact single-player strategy it had spent years trying to diversify away from.

The PS4 era conditioned people to expect a steady stream of major first-party releases. The PS5 era increasingly became a waiting game.

God of War Ragnarök was 2022. Horizon Forbidden West was 2022. Spider-Man 2 was 2023. The Last of Us Part II was 2020. Naughty Dog's next game is still years after that. Other major projects have similarly enormous gaps between announcement and release.

So what does Sony increasingly fill those gaps with?

Remasters. Remakes. PC ports that are busted on release (and have terminated entirely). Third-party exclusivity deals (which themselves are fewer and further between). Smaller releases. Live-service experiments. Announcements for games that won't actually be playable for years.

I'm not saying remasters are inherently bad. However, there is a difference between having a healthy portfolio that includes remasters and increasingly relying on them because your first-party development pipeline has become so slow and inconsistent. All the while, the hardware, game MSRP, and multiplayer-enabling PS Plus subscription have only gotten substantially more expensive.

None of those decisions exists in a vacuum.

If I'm paying more for the hardware, more for games, more for the subscription required for online play, and waiting longer and longer for first-party games, I am naturally going to ask what exactly I'm paying for. Sony has essentially spent years making the question "Why do I need a PlayStation?" harder to answer.

And then there's the physical-media issue, which is another piece of the same broader shift. The industry is increasingly moving toward a world where you don't really own games in the traditional sense. Sony is pushing harder toward digital purchases and subscriptions while physical releases become less central to the ecosystem.

All of this means the customer experience increasingly looks like this: buy an expensive console, buy an expensive game, pay for an increasingly expensive subscription, accept that your digital purchases are licenses rather than traditional physical ownership, and then wait several years for the next major first-party game.

And now we get to the most recent devastation, Hideo Kojima.

Because if you wanted to write the most absurd and puzzling update to this entire saga, you couldn't do much better than what happened last night.

Sony and Kojima Productions announced Physint in 2024. Kojima's relationship with PlayStation was one of the most obvious creative partnerships Sony had. Kojima's history with Metal Gear was inseparable from the PlayStation brand, and Sony had already partnered with him on Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2.

Physint was supposed to be the next big Kojima Productions espionage game. The sort of project that felt like an obvious continuation of the relationship between PlayStation and one of the industry's most recognizable auteurs. A sign that maybe Sony had renewed its interest in industry-leading first party, single player experiences.

And on September 9th, 2026, Sony cancelled it.

Then Xbox picked it up.

Let that sink in.

Sony spent decades building a relationship with Hideo Kojima, announced a major PlayStation-exclusive project with him, and then cancelled the project badly enough that Kojima had to spend the last 3 months looking for a new publisher and found it in an Xbox that's seemingly been reinvigorated over the last few months; how that plays out only time will tell.

One thing is for certain, Xbox now has two Kojima Productions exclusives in OD and Physint. Sony has none. There is something almost poetic about that. The company that spent this generation trying desperately to build a live-service empire is now watching its competitor pick up one of the most obvious single-player projects it could possibly have had.

Let’s run this generation’s numbers:

Factions was cancelled after stalling Naughty Dog for 5 years. Hunters Gathering is being rebuilt after stalling Guerrilla for 6 years. Destiny 2’s service ended with no renewal in sight, Bungie was gutted and they cling onto life via a hardcore extraction shooter in Marathon. Their Gummy Bears incubation project was spun off into an MIA studio in TeamLFG. Arrowhead walked away with the bank as they are not owned by SIE and do not want to be. Bluepoint was shuttered over a God of War live service they felt pressured to pitch. Firewalk was shuttered over Concord. Fairgame$ and its developer studio, Haven, are MIA. Firesprite’s Twisted Metal was never released. London Studio was shut down over a fantasy Live Service that was never seen. Bend Studio has been stalled for 7 years. Neon Koi was shut down. Deviation Games’ title never came to light. Sony has spent the last 6 years relying heavily upon the efforts of Insomniac and Santa Monica to make the ecosystem uniquely appealing, and the former is now being inundated with negative sentiment rooted in guilt by association. The PS5 is more expensive than it was on launch. PS Plus is more expensive than it was on launch. Physical discs will no longer be made for new games after 2028 which means that Playstation will have a complete monopoly over software distribution on its hardware following that day. PC ports were axed because it led to more players jumping ship than new adopters. Sony became a majority stakeholder in Kadokawa only for FromSoftware (a subsidiary of Bandai Namco, which is owned outright by Kadokawa) to send out an exclusive live service title to Nintendo in The Duskbloods. Kojima Productions’ relationship with SIE is likely permanently fractured. Jim Ryan got to retire after presiding over the Live Service strategy, while Hermen Hulst inherited the wheel and continues trying to steer the wreckage through Charybdis. You might be able to play GTA6 “best” on PS5 but that’s a $100 video game. 

Play, seemingly, does have limits,™.