How did Sony spend so much money on new live service games when they have a ready made hit in their vault?

Sony’s plan to launch twelve ‘Games As Services’ titles has been a complete disaster by any standards, fuelled by mismanagement and poor business decisions to the point that almost all of the titles have been cancelled.  Naughty Dog spent years making The Last of Us 2 multiplayer before someone pointed out that they’d needed a full time team to work on ongoing content, staff that Naughty Dog simple did not have. Concord’s demise has been widely covered, the game was good but launching a colourful team shooter and not making it free-to-play meant it was dead on arrival.

Most recently, the live service games at Bluepoint and Bend Studio have been cancelled, both had been in development for at least four years. This leaves just Fairgame$ from Jade Raymond’s studio Haven, a Horizon MMORPG, and an unknown live service game from Jason Blundell.

All of this has cost Sony hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’ve had very little success with this strategy. Some of this could have easily been predicted, as launching a game that is competing with the likes of Overwatch was always going to be a massive battle. To do that, you need to generate huge interest in your game and market the socks off it, something Sony failed to do with Concord. Spending millions on a game that looks and feels like ten other free-to-play titles is never going to work – players need a unique hook such as Helldivers 2’s award-winning take on Starship Troopers, or the surefire success of a Gran Turismo 7. Those are Sony’s only live service successes so far.

If only Sony had something in its back catalogue, a well-known franchise that has sold millions of copies in the last couple of generations, already has a track record with multiplayer, and runs on an engine that means a PC version could be made. Oh wait, they do: it’s Killzone.

The Killzone franchise began back in the days of the PlayStation 2 with Sony looking for a shooter to rival Microsoft’s massive hit, Halo. It did not quite reach those heights but a sequel was soon green-lit and developer Guerrilla Games was purchased by Sony.  Killzone 2 was released in 2009 and is widely agreed to be the best of the franchise with a Metacritic score of 91, with Killzone 3 following on in 2011. The next game, Killzone: Shadow Fall was a showcase launch title for Sony’s next-gen console, the PS4, while Killzone: Mercenary was a boundary-pushing title on the PS Vita.

The franchise has sold well over six million copies which these days doesn’t sound that good, Shadow Fall certainly fell short of sales expectations, but the fan base still exists and calls for a new game are heard regularly. Guerrilla Games has moved on to the Horizon franchise, which has now sold over 32 million copies and no one can blame them for wanting to do something different, but Killzone is still recent enough that it could be revived.

One of the best things about these games were their multiplayer modes, built around complimentary classes, large 32-player battles in Killzone 2, and shifting game objectives in the main Warzone mode. From Killzone 2 through to Shadow Fall, there’s more than enough maps, modes and ideas to draw upon that would stand out against the main multiplayer games of the last few years. Even just having a grounded, militaristic sci-fi style would contrast to the over-the-top cosmetics of Call of Duty.

Killzone F2P

Now, I am not a game developer and will make this sound much easier than it actually is, but ripping out the multiplayer from Killzone: Shadow Fall and using this as the foundation for a new game would be much more cost-effective than creating a brand new game from scratch. It’s still one of the best-looking games on PS4, and with eleven years of updates to the Decima engine, on which it runs, there should be some straightforward technical improvements to make beyond that.

Warming up the Shadow Fall servers probably wouldn’t be flashy or new enough, and it could be desirable to roll back to having more classes and roles, as in Killzone 2 and 3. Even starting from scratch, Killzone could easily provide the basis for a new game in the free-to-play market, and it’s far more obvious to greenlight a shooter than to keep trying to bring back Twisted Metal or God of War multiplayer, as Bend and Bluepoint were rumoured to be doing.

There’s even easy wins when looking for ongoing content. There are plenty of maps from older Killzone games that could be rebuilt, and a seasonal story could be wrapped around it, maybe retelling the franchise’s main narrative as maps are added. For cosmetics, Sony could raid their back catalogue with skins. There’s the recent Killzone cosmetics for Helldivers 2, so it’s only fair that they repay the favour, and stylised Resistance: Fall of Man cosmetics would go down a treat without breaking the sci-fi military tone too much. Halo Infinite has had some pretty out-there cosmetics, like the samurai armour and other alternate universe designs, but always manages to keep the sci-fi tone running throughout.

The main question would be who could take this project on? Guerrilla themselves have no real interest in returning to Killzone – they’re busy making a Horizon multiplayer game, anyway – but there’s obviously idle hands at Bend Studios and Bluepoint. Maybe they don’t have the specific expertise for a first person shooter, but Bluepoint has excelled in the past at remaking games, and with some guidance from Guerrilla to get the right feel, or Bungie who are pretty great at shooters themselves, this could be a good fit.

Sadly the obvious path is rarely the one Sony follows lately, but perhaps after being burned to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a cheaper, almost ready made F2P title could be just what they need.

Written by
News Editor, very inappropriate, probs fancies your dad.

2 Comments

  1. Sony’s been effing around this gen but they dont get punished for it by the competition. Instead they get their games (Microsoft’s) on PlayStation. So the y can keep on effing around.

    This gen has somewhat disappointing.

  2. I’m not one for mp games but i would love to see this series rebooted.

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