UPDATE
Are you hopeful that Jim Ryan’s words will continue to be true for PlayStation going forward? Let us know below!
ORIGINAL STORY
PlayStation and its many leaders are in a curious position right now. The reason for that was how they tried to take Microsoft to court to stop the merger between their rival and Activision Blizzard. One of the most outspoken people about that merger was Jim Ryan, who said that the merger would be bad for the game industry as a whole. The FTC helped Sony try and stop the merger, but to no avail. Just as interesting, thanks to the court case, numerous documents have leaked, including ones that have Jim Ryan talking about the focus of PlayStation going forward.
Reddit found the leak, and it showed an investor’s video where Jim Ryan talked about the games their brand would focus on going forward. The company had already made it known that by 2026, they would have almost a dozen live-service titles on the market. Many in the game industry feel this is the “future of gaming.” At the same time, gamers know this is a slippery slope, and not everything needs to be live-service, especially when plenty of epic games are single-player narrative titles.
Thankfully, in that video, Jim Ryan admitted that while live-service games will be important to them, it won’t be the only thing they focus on:
“It would be naive for us to assume that all 10 will be massive successes so that is not a necessary condition for us to double first party revenues. That is certainly not what we’re assuming. Clearly, the distinction between a hit and not a hit is not a binary one. And don’t forget that as we do this, we will continue to publish the games that have served us so well over the years. These first person, graphically beautiful narrative rich games will continue to be the bedrock of our first party publishing business.”
That’s good to hear because Sony has absolutely been cranking out incredible single-player titles for their PlayStation systems. Just in the last few years, the PS5 has had exclusives like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarok, Final Fantasy XVI, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is upcoming, and there will be more.
It would be foolish to shy away from titles like that, especially with their huge sales numbers. Plus, as Jim Ryan said, they can’t simply say that all of their live-service titles will be hits. Not to mention, the narrative title is something that is decades old and proven, and the live-service games can’t say that.
