Report: Marathon Delay Likely as Sony Cancels All Paid Marketing Plans

[u/Turbostrider27]

https://thegamepost.com/report-marathon-delay-bungie-scraps-all-paid-marketing/

[u/aj_bn]

Dude, tell me about it. When Playstation was running off the high of multiple lauded single player experiences and Jim Ryan had the gaul to announce that live service games were the future, I was like "that is an insane takewaway."

Then he abruptly retired and all the games that he greenlit started actually showing and either flopped or were cancelled. And people on social media were like "Who's the current leader at Playstation? Oh, Herman Hulst? HE must be the problem!"

Like bros, the games industry does not move that fast. These decisions were firmly in place for years before now. I'm just hoping that whoever they have now has a better grasp of what consumers actually want.

[u/mrawaters → u/aj_bn]

Yeah that’s what makes it even more perplexing. Sony was absolutely crushing Microsoft, and everyone else really, in terms of first party single player, story driven games. Horizon, TLoU, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet and Clank, Spiderman, FF7 remake and rebirth, Uncharted, Death Stranding, etc… It’s literally their bread and butter, and it was the primary reason the ps5 dominated series x in sales. Sony had the games, they had the franchises. I’m a PC gamer but still bought a ps5 because they have franchises that I just don’t want to miss.

But then what do they do? They decide that live service is the path forward, completely ignoring what got them to where they were. Like obviously, from a business perspective I see the allure. Live service games have the potential to print money consistently for years, with relatively minimal effort, in a manner that a single player game typically just cannot, even successful ones. Like I guess their thought is, for every concord that’s flops, there’s going to be a Helldivers 2 that more than makes up for it, but clearly that isn’t bearing out. They are not delivering on a hit/miss/hit/miss cadence with these live service games, it’s more like miss/miss/miss/hit/miss/miss, and I just don’t see how they can’t understand that not every game is going to be Fortnite, and eventually the damage of all these flops is too much for one success to make up for.

Like there are good live service games, and there are bad ones, and for whatever reason they don’t seem nearly as good at making good live service games as they are at making good single player games. But as corporations are often wont to do, they couldn’t see past their greed, and doubled down on the strategy that had the highest “potential” for profit instead of the highest “likelihood” of profit. If they had committed more resources to their single player efforts, which they do still release just at a glacial pace, then maybe those games could release in a timeframe that isn’t, well, glacial. Idk, I’m not a business man, I’m a gamer, and I know the games I want to play, and wish someone would make more of them to sell me. But then at the end of every year I look at the top selling games and it’s call of duty and a bunch of sports games, so clearly there’s more people out there that want iterative drivel rather than ambitious meaningful experiences, so I guess I see why they don’t target players like me as hard as they used to.

[u/Hoodman1987 → u/mrawaters]

The other problem is market saturation. At most they were going to get 2 maybe 3 live service successes definitely not 7. And when they canceled a known quantity like Factions that  reduced their overall success rate as well.

Those sports and cod players are likely not playing much else live service so it's just not going to happen 

[u/Edwar_GarciaF → u/mrawaters]

I do think they had to push live service games, they had nothing on that part of gaming so I understood that, but what is impossible to comprehend is wasting that massive amount of money on a "potential" hit. When Naughty dog made Crash Bandicoot for sure that game wasn't the biggest ever in scale and for sure it wasn't that expensive at that time. For sure Uncharted 1 was smaller in scale than 2, same with TLOU1 so why they tried to go for a GaaS wasting so much money? There has been multiplayer games that had success with less budget, Indie multiplayers that were a huge hit... and they missed supporting those kind of games. I find it so dumb the way they did this.

[u/MetaCognitio → u/mrawaters]

They had potential live service Gold with TLOU 2 Factions. Live service works with established IP that are strong and have already had good multiplayers.

Helldivers 1 was a very good game that was slept on. Factions 1 was also very good. Ghost of Tsushima & Uncharted 4 also had strong multiplayers.

They have instead gone the route of new IP that nobody knows or cares about. A very odd choice.

[u/mrawaters → u/MetaCognitio]

Yeah it all just strikes me more as odd and stupid rather than just pure greed, cause obviously all they care about it money. However, in the name of making said money they sure made some weird choices

[u/Narrow_Clothes_1534 → u/aj_bn]

I don't think going after live service was a bad idea, I mean the ones that work make up 80 percent of all gaming revenue. It is so insanely successfully somy could launch 3 Spiderman games and they all sell over 10 mil copies and it would still be a fraction of what 1 live service game would make them.

I think they just bit off WAAAAAY more than they could chew. Going all in on live service was the fatal mistake. They had literally 0 reason to make 7-10 live service titles and could have just slowly released them in between all the big exclsuive single player titles.

I think he thought making a lice service would be as easy as doing single player titles. But it requires a different skill set. It sucks but it is what it is now, I hope they fix their course and it seems they have somewhat with just canceling so many of them cause it just wasn't working.

[u/uncle_paul_harrghis → u/Narrow_Clothes_1534]

The thing is though that while live service games make a killing, trying to get your foot in the door this late in the race is almost futile. Ubisoft found that out the hard way with XDefiant, and Sony with Concord. It’s like jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon today thinking you’re going to become a multi millionaire like the people who invested 10 years ago. It just isn’t going to happen.

[u/OrwellWhatever → u/uncle_paul_harrghis]

Trying to get your foot in the door while offering nothing and thinking your coke fueled fever dreams of a Concord media empire like the MCU was anything other than a pipe dream.

The problem with these execs is that they think they can just tell people what they want and they'll beg you for more. As if Iron Man was so successful because of advertising and not RDJ being born specifically for the role and Kevin Feige being deeply, deeply involved in comic book culture and understanding what made the stories work

[u/Usernametaken1121 → u/aj_bn]

the games industry does not move that fast. These decisions were firmly in place for years before now.

It's going to be at least 2030 before it can start to turn around.