PlayStation probably has a lot to learn from Concord and Helldivers 2 if it intends to continue its strategy dedicated to live service gamesalthough it seems to have been significantly scaled down. The first one seems a flop already announced: despite a rather abundant marketing, between presentations dedicated to the State of Play, trailers and animated shorts and three seasons already planned, the multiplayer shooter from Firewalk Studios has just failed to impress players and the beta that took place in the past few weeks seems to have confirmed the doubts rather than dispelled them. It doesn’t help that the game is not free-to-play and that it will aim to attack an already very aggressive sector, that of hero shooters, which will soon also welcome Marvel Rivals and Valve’s Deadklock.
Helldivers 2 instead it turned out to be one of the most successful games of this year, even surpassing the numbers of a giant like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, despite Sony apparently not seeming to bet that much on it. Sure, there were trailers during PlayStation events and some in-depth coverage on the PlayStation Blog, but it’s clear that the game was overshadowed by the bigger productions of PlayStation Studios, even by the standards of the genre: no pre-launch beta, no closed-door press testing, limited marketing and bare-bones launch servers, with a maximum capacity well below the large amount of players who purchased the game, requiring timely interventions to correct the shot.
An attractive but risky market
As I said at the beginning, Sony has a lot to learn from these two games. But what exactly? To summarize in a few words, perhaps the most important lesson is that live services have so many variables that can determine their success or failure that I’m a bit of a lottery.
You have to have the right idea at the right time, the know-how, huge budgets, a far-sighted long-term vision and the courage to keep going even when you make a misstep, because it only takes a moment to alienate hundreds of thousands of players and winning them back requires much more time and effort. To stay on topic, just think of the case of Helldivers 2. Despite the first few months of great success, the community has shrunk a lot (although it is still traveling at good numbers for the genre), either because of the problems that appeared from patch to patch or were never resolved, or because of unwelcome changes to the balance, or because of the controversy over the mandatory PSN account, or because the unreleased content of weight arrived with an eyedropper.
Let’s be clear, Sony’s idea of aiming for GaaS is not wrong, the mistake was rather the haste with which it wanted to try to attack this very uncertain market by planning more than 10 games, whereas up until now PlayStation Studios’ productions were mostly focused on single-player experiences. After all, for every Genshin Impact, Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG and League of Legends that thrives there are dozens of projects that travel on much more modest numbers or that fail, some without ever even seeing the light, while this landscape is becoming more and more saturated, making it even more difficult for new players to enter. And it is no coincidence that the companies capable of churning out more than one successful live service can be counted on the fingers of one hand, a crippled one at that. Even Ubisoft, after the extraordinary success of Rainbow Six Siege, collected a series of flops (Hyper Scape above all), cancelled projects and other underperforming games, before hitting the mark again with XDefiant, at least for now.
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial staff and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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