Bungie Will Help Sony Make 12 Live Service Games By 2025

In January, Sony bought Bungie for $3.5 billion, giving the company one of the most popular first-person shooter games to compete with Microsoft and the various game studios it owns. Now, according to Forbes, Sony "has a whole plan to integrate Bungie's live service-building philosophies into its other teams that are making games [...]." From the report: Bungie enjoys one of the major live service successes in the current era, 7, going on 8 years of Destiny as a hyper-engaging franchises, and Sony believes the lessons they've learned can translate into other places. Twelve other places, to be specific. Sony is apparently about to announce a massive slate of live service offerings to join its traditional single player fare. While high profile AAA Sony games like God of War and Horizon Forbidden West sell well and are praised by fans and critics, they are not ongoing revenue streams like live service games can be. For Sony, they feel like they're missing a rather large boat. The plan here is to ramp up to have 3 live service games by FY2022, 6 by FY2023, 10 by FY2025 and 12 by FY2025. Currently, the only game they even consider a live service title in their lineup as The Show 22. So uh, 12 by 2025? That seems... ambitious, even with Bungie on board to help.

Continuous Revenue Streams?

[muh_freeze_peach]

How on earth did video game companies survive on their pittance before live service games came to the rescue?
Oh they want MORE money. Got it.

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[mjwx]

How on earth did video game companies survive on their pittance before live service games came to the rescue?
Oh they want MORE money. Got it.

TBF, game didn't used to cost so much... By that I mean they didn't spend dozens of millions on advertising.

Small, Indie game studios have been providing updates and support for their games for years. Not just big games like Star Citizen either.

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[muh_freeze_peach]

Indeed. However, the amount of money spent on marketing should be expressed through the retail price of the games, which has been at $60 for at least 10 years now. Back when I was a kid, some NES games could cost that much, if not more. But I suppose raising the cost of traditional offline games is out of the question as people have gotten used to the $60 price point for a AAA title.

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[Iamthecheese]

Star Citizen still isn't out of alpha. They need the actual game out before we can talk about ongoing support. A better example is Elite:Dangerous which has pushed out continual improvements for years. But by my guess even they will stop development after one more big DLC. The real problem there is the ongoing cost of support for a game that sells a license but not a monthly fee. It's just not a good model.

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[UnknownSoldier]

I'm not defending GaaS (Games as a Service) by any means since it doesn't respect a gamer's time or wallet but I DO want to point out a different perspective having been in the games industry for decades:

* MANY video games companies didn't survive. The transition to 3D in the early 2000's killed a LOT of indies. Moving from 2D to 3D is really moving from 2D to 4D. You now had to deal with skinning, quaternions, 4x4 matrices, managing the different types of Vertex Buffers, load balancing the CPU and GPU, e

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[muh_freeze_peach]

I thank you for your cogent and informative post good sir.

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[UnknowingFool]

Most of your points apply to AAA 3D games though. For example not all games must be 3D and not all games must be AAA. For example, CD Projekt released a Gwent as a standalone after it was found to be popular in the Witcher III. Independent studios can make a decent living with small development teams.

Its Bungie

[DarkRookie2]

It will Bungie games. Which always look nice, and have some good graphics, but the story and world design lead a lot to be desired.

I read that as "Bungle"....

[Chrisq]

.... and wondered if Zippy and George would be helping Sony too

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[muh_freeze_peach]

I think it's trying to communicate...

The most anti consumer business models going

[SlashDotCanSuckMy777]

You pay for product, and then Bungie takes it away.

Avoid anything they make like the plague.

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[DarkRookie2]

100%
Or they add things to make the experience worse.

Player Base

[Dewiltse]

Is there even a desire for this many live service games like how Destiny is run? Most of the time, casual players play 1, maybe 2 live service games like this. The rest of the time it's either solo games they can pause and come back to, or they live their life. Having 12 different live service games leaves you competing against yourself hard. So maybe this is more "shotgun ideas at the wall and see which game does best" then cut down to like 2-3 games you truly support long term?