Sony Shifting Focus on Single-Player Games for PlayStation 6

Sony seems to have learned its lesson the hard way from Concord. Regardless of how you look at it, Sony canceled nine of their Live Service games that were under development, and not too many PlayStation users were upset about it. Although we were never given the chance to view many of them, we are aware that they were heavily invested in development and received substantial resources over a long period of time.

It seems that yet another big PlayStation Live service game was canceled, which may not come as much of a surprise. This is supposedly the long-awaited Horizon MMO game called Project H from Korean developer NCSoft. Sony approved it, along with another Live Service game based on the Horizon Series. This comes shortly after news broke that the live-service God of War games developed by Bluepoint and Bend Studio were both scrapped. However, it seems that PlayStation Studios is now developing a second Horizon multiplayer game, which is safe for the time being.

It's absurd that Sony approved not one but two Horizon live service initiatives; we have no idea what was in their minds. A Korean news article stated that many NCSoft titles, including Project H, were shelved in late 2024. Former job postings and staff profiles on LinkedIn proved that Project Skyline—the Horizon massively multiplayer online game—was, in reality, Project H. This is definitely devastating for NCSoft, a studio that already had several of their projects canceled. NCSoft will have to start all over and bring different ideas for games and projects to Sony, which is presumably a single-player game.

It comes as no great surprise to learn that this Horizon multiplayer game has been discontinued. Clearly, Sony has taken a different approach to their live service plan. This certainly does not suggest that they have given up on live service entirely; there are still PlayStation-exclusive games in the works, such as Fairgame$, Marathon, Project Gummybears, and the uncancelled internal multiplayer Horizon game. Although these games are currently in production and seem to be scheduled for release, they might potentially be canceled at any moment. The continuation of hearing about the cancellation of initiatives, especially those involving live service, would not surprise us.

Although the promise was there, Sony's decision to approve not one but two Horizon MMO games—more significantly, two Horizon live service games—is excessive. Something had to have been on Sony's mind during all of this situation. Sony's drastic change of strategy must have a solid reason. They would have made a far worse mistake if they had continued developing these games, only to have them released and fail poorly, causing them to lose even more time and money.

One point to be noted here is that Sony canceled all these projects but hasn't shut down any of the studios yet. This means most of these studios will either be assigned to new single-player projects or jointly develop the live service games Sony hasn't canceled yet. And if these studios are to work on new single-player games, with the PlayStation 6 coming out at the end of this generation, they will have more time to make course corrections.

This also means that for the rest of the PlayStation 5 generation, the number of PlayStation-exclusive games will inevitably go down. Yes, there are some games likely to be released this year and some released next year. But looking at all these cancelations, most of these projects could've been single-player games for the PS5-gen and later released on PS6 with backward compatibility. By now, there would have been twice as many double-A and triple-A single-player games in the works for this year and the next two years.

However, this generation will remember the history of Sony's ignorance about their potential to make a dent in the live service industry. Undoubtedly, Sony has a backup plan somewhere. After all, PlayStation does have a few single-player games in the works for the rest of this generation. It's true that Sony flubbed badly and learned their lesson the hard way. The sheer number of canceled projects and studios that had the opportunity to develop single-player games but chose not to is mind-boggling. We will now have to wait for their next-gen announcement.

If there's one good thing to come out of this, it's that Sony is apparently concentrating heavily on single-player games again. Imagine the PS5 generation's insane roster if they had just released an influx of single-player games. However, Sony will not entirely abandon multiplayer or live service. Now that we're approaching the PlayStation 6 release, maybe this will be more than made up for if many of these titles are greenlit and developers get to work on them again.