I can’t be the only person getting tired of hearing about all these live service games. Call me selfish, but I really wish it’d just stop.
26.10.2023 - 06:39 / gameranx.com / Jim Ryan / Shawn Layden / Connie Booth
David Scott Jaffe has shared a shocking update on Connie Booth and the situation behind the scenes at PlayStation.
Following his account that Booth had left the company, but Jaffe now claims in a new video that Connie was actually fired. Jaffe clarifies he doesn’t know the journalistic standard for verification, but given his connections and contacts at Sony, he feels certain that he has verified this information.
Jaffe further states that Booth was not given prior notice or even told in advance, in Jaffe’s words, ‘it just happened.’
Jaffe also compares it to the experiences of Shawn Layden and Allan Becker, also Sony veterans. Allan was Senior Vice President at Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios until 2020. He got a call near the start of his last week, and told that his last day was Friday. In sharp contrast, Shawn was literally escorted out of the building on the same day. Connie’s firing was somewhere in between, according to Jaffe.
Jaffe’s source connected this firing to Jim Ryan’s plan to push PlayStation to live service games. As we know, Sony’s existing studios were not happy about the change. The fate of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Factions game was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Now here’s where things get strange. Somehow, Connie got blamed for what happened next. Jaffe doesn’t know the exact details here, so it’s hard to speculate on it, but Jaffe considers it strange that Connie ended up on the bad side of this. As we had noted, she is a veteran of the PlayStation team right from the very start, and her roots in Sony go even deeper than that.
Jaffe then revealed that Connie’s team left at the same time that they left. Now Jaffe believes that it isn’t likely that they were fired, just because she was fired. But once again, Jaffe isn’t speculating further than that.
Finally, Jaffe revealed as an aside that Hermen Hulst was in favor of cutting down all Sony’s Japan Studio. For those who don’t remember, Sony actually did pull this trigger, laying off staff who had worked on Knack. Historically, this is also the same studio who worked on Patapon, LocoRoco, Ape Escape, Days Gone, and others.
We cannot take it as a given that Jaffe’s source reflects the entire mood inside Sony, but it does not paint a favorable picture of the company. It’s also strange to be learning about these goings on which would otherwise just be completely out of public view. In any case, it’s not really in our place as fans to intrude on how Sony handles their affairs. We hope, at least, that Sony makes the right decisions for PlayStation’s fans, as well as their workers, and maybe even their stockholders too.
I can’t be the only person getting tired of hearing about all these live service games. Call me selfish, but I really wish it’d just stop.
Sony, who announced plans to create twelve new live service games by the end of its FY 2025, has now delayed half of them, according to the company's latest earnings call.
Sony have announced that half of the Live Service games that it had planned to release by FY25 have now been pushed back and no longer have a release window. The news comes from an earnings call in which Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki, explained the situation.
Today Sony revealed that it’s shifting its strategy with live service games. The company is scaling back the number of live service games it plans by fiscal year 2025 to launch by half.
Sony will only release six live titles by the end of March 2026 instead of the 12 initially announced.
Sony announced it was acquiring Destiny 2 maker Bungie for $3.6 billion in January of 2022. A week later, in a quarterly financial results briefing, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki revealed that PlayStation planned to launch more than 10 live service games by March 2026, with Bungie helping the company in the space. In an earnings call held today, Totoki stated that of its 12 live service games, it will only release six by Fiscal Year 2025, which ends March 2026, as reported by VideoGamesChronicle.
Sony is reconsidering the live service plans it made earlier this year, while Gotham Knights' publisher says it wants to go all in.
During today's Q2 2023 conference call with investors, Sony Vice President, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totoki (who's currently the interim CEO of SIE and looking for a permanent replacement for Jim Ryan) revealed that half of the twelve live service PlayStation games planned to launch by March 2026 have been delayed.
Sony is focusing on quality over quantity with its live-service gaming push.
Sony has made no secret of the fact that intends to significantly expand its presence in the live service space, even having confirmed earlier this year that it plans on releasing 12 live service games before April 2026. Intriguingly, however, it seems the company is pivoting where those plans are concerned.
Warner Bros. will be heavily veering into a live service model for its future games. During its latest Q3 earnings call, CEO David Zaslav confirmed that the company plans to transform its biggest video game franchises into long-term products, bolstered by regular content drops and heavy monetisation. In recent years, gamers have developed a distaste for such money-hungry practices, which often lock out content behind some form of paywall or a battle pass, instead of providing a complete game at launch. The idea is for players to keep playing WB-published games for months, instead of having AAA developers put out a new game every three to four years — which is the general cycle.
Sony president Hiroki Totoki has said the company is reviewing PlayStation's live service game push amid development trouble that has already seen Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game hit with setbacks.