Why do Sony keep making obviously bad decisions?

While the PlayStation 5 has been the runaway winner of the generation, running laps around Xbox for the last few years, it’s been a pretty bumpy ride. Some of that has been out of Sony’s hands – the chip shortages and the general economy, for example – but you do have to wonder about some of the choices they’ve made along the way, where even someone with the most basic grasp of the video game market could have told them they aren’t making the best decisions.

Outside of the PS5, Sony’s other hardware plans haven’t panned out, for various reasons. PSVR 2 is a great headset, but with gamers feeling the financial squeeze, it’s just priced too high to be appealing. That wouldn’t be so bad if there were great reasons to save up for one, but outside a handful of exclusives – literally, you can count them on one hand’s fingers – there’s been no sign of first party support, and the PC adapter released last month feels like they’re ready to give up on it.

Then there’s the PlayStation Portal, a truly wonderful idea that should let you stream PlayStation games anywhere you want for £200, and grab some of that juicy Switch market in the process. Except it’s not quite that simple, because even when playing within a good home network, we’ve seen the remote play stumble and interrupt gameplay, so how is it going to handle hotel or cafe Wi-Fi? A lot of this could be improved if you could just stream from PlayStation Plus, hooking up to Sony’s optimised streaming servers, and being able to tap into the full PS Plus library.

Sure the Portal sold out as soon as it went on sale, but that’s pretty much inevitable with tech these days. There are plenty of units available now, but is anyone buying them?

But the bigger problems seem to be on the game development side, where Sony’s decision to chase after the live service big bucks has stumbled, staggered, lurched forward and picked up a big of momentum, and then fallen flat on its face.

Naughty Dog’s full The Last of Us multiplayer spin-off was in development for years, having split off from The Last of Us Part II, and grown and grown in scope and ambition… but then someone pointed out they would need a full team to support the game as a live service and Naughty Dog did not have the staff to do that. So they cancelled it.

Just… how? How did it get that far before someone did a headcount at Naughty Dog? Before someone pointed out just how many people have to work at Epic and Bungie to support their games? To make it worse, the game had been teased and mentioned for years since the launch of The Last of Us Part 2, it wasn’t a secret, so fans were really let down. And let’s be honest, those fans basically just wanted a revamped Factions mode from TLOU with prettier graphics, TLOU 2’s enhanced gameplay and maybe a bit better progression to keep them hooked.

But then came Helldivers 2, the sequel that no one asked for but that turned out to be exactly the game everyone wanted. A deservedly massive hit with Sony selling the PC version across the globe, including in regions where you could not make a Sony account… and then they told PC players they would need a Sony account to continue playing, were forced to backtrack on that demand, but have still cut off unsupported regions. The game is still great, though, and shows exactly how finding a small niche and going big with it can be a major success.

Which brings us to Concord, which is basically the opposite of that. It’s an excellent, colourful, multiplayer hero shooter that cost money to play. Going up against the biggest game in the world, an excellent, colourful, multiplayer hero shooter called Overwatch which is now free. Oh, and there’s also just Fortnite, Warframe, Valorant, that Marvel hero shooter that’s about to come along. They’re all free to play, and the only time you can really beat free is if you’re first.

Having a price tag worked for Helldivers 2 because it’s in a market where paying up front is still common, but Concord turned up to the party much too late, and you have to wonder why was it made and supported more and more and more strongly by Sony over the last few years? Taking it offline and reworking it, presumably into an F2P model,

While all that has been going on, Destiny 2 has been coming to its natural end. The expansion, The Final Shape, was the perfect conclusion to a story that has been running for ten years. A story that has had fans gripped with mysteries and lore which have taken a decade to pay off, The Final Shape ends with massive battle ripped from Avengers Endgame and a beautiful cut scene that will have had a lot of year one players crying.

Then they announced the game would continue and many people really did not care. Why would they, after investing ten years in that story, building and building to epic and most importantly, satisfying conclusion, players are finding it hard to be engaged with what appears to be a story tacked on to the end of the game just so they have something to sell. And at the same time, Bungie are barrelling down the path of trying to make a big budget PvPvE extraction shooter reboot of the early 90s FPS Marathon – a game that by it’s very nature will speak to a very different audience than Destiny’s PvE fans.

Sony’s live service ambitions are feeling on shaky ground, but what’s even more confusing is that they’re not making use of what they already have. Why not bring back Killzone, for example? Now I’m not pretending that it’s no work at all, but they could bring back Killzone’s multiplayer, revive classic maps and modes, release it as F2P on PC and PS5 and make money off Battle Passes and cosmetic DLC. We’re seeing the arena shooter still has some clout,

Oh, and one other word: SOCOM.

At the very least, this week has given us a reminder of just what made PlayStation so good in the first place. Astro Bot is a pure delight, it’s playful and fun, and it’s a single player game – something that Sony built the whole PS4 generation on. Now, we’re not going to tell Sony to never do live service or multiplayer, and there are success stories, but it’s pretty clear that they’ve made some poor decisions along the way, gone too big and tried to go too quickly, when smaller and steadier would have been safer and worked better in the long term.