Sony CFO Admits Its Live Service Plans are 'Not Entirely Going Smoothly' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 07 August 2025 / 4,379 Views
Sony CFO Lin Tao in a Q&A session with investors admitted PlayStation's live service plans have not gone smoothly, but states progress is being made.
Tao when asked about the current status of PlayStation's live service plans said there is negativity towards its plans following Concord being shut down and the Marathon delay, however, she believes live service games are worthwhile.
"Last year Concord [shut down], and this year Marathon was postponed, so somewhat negative news has been coming out," said Tao (via VideoGamesChronicle).
"But if we look at the past five years, five years ago live service games were almost non-existent for PlayStation Studios. We [now] have Helldivers 2, MLB The Show and Gran Turismo 7, and Bungie’s Destiny 2, so we have these four live services contributing to sales and profits in a stable manner."
Tao stated that around 40 percent of Sony's first-party software revenue for the quarter ending June 2025 were from live service games.
"For Q1 the live service ratio was about 40%, for the full year it’s a little less, probably between 20-30%," she stated. "So in terms of the transformation, it’s not entirely going smoothly, but from a longer-term perspective, if you look at the changes over five years you see that there’s definitely been a change.
"Of course, we recognise that there are still many issues, so we should learn the lessons from mistakes and make sure that we introduce live service content where there’s less waste and it’s more smooth."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Sony discovers punching yourself in the dick, hurts.
You don't say
What happened to MLB the show that makes it live service now and not in the past. Also wasn't GT Sport live service as well considering we count GT7 as one, even Driveclub could be counted as one considering it's support?
Beats me. I guess it depends on what the company considers to be a lot of live service titles. Microsoft has like......10 now? Give or take. EA probably has somewhere around 6 or 7. Take-Two has about 5 as well. Perhaps compared to other major publishers, 2 wouldn't be considered that much.
Nothing changed, the popular term for those sorts of games changed. MMOs were the original live services but nobody called them that because it wasn't a popular term yet. Now playstation has an active live service initiative so all multiplayer projects have to be included even if they would have existed anyway.
I wonder how far they want to have this "transformation". I like HD2 a lot actually. But I hate seeing so many studios focusing on live service instead of narrative heavy single player games. So much wasted potential with Bluepoint, Bend and others.
They just haven't invested enough money yet. I'll email them and tell them to double down.
I think lots of this stuff is said in relation to one game failing which is weird. So they ignore HD2 success because Concord failed? 1 massive success, 1 massive failure. MLB The Show has service stuff but is also just a baseball game. GT is the same, no? So far more success then failures but were they expecting all their games to succeed no matter what?
"But if we look at the past five years, five years ago live service games were almost non-existent for PlayStation Studios."
Yeah, when we were all locked in doors and told to play video games. All this live service stuff from all companies is a result from this, it takes 4-5 years developement time to make a modern big game, well now is the time we'd be getting all the service games that came from that era, whether we want them or not now. However, Sony have been putting out (or trying to) a more diverse lineup than just epic story based adventures and it's hit or miss for them.
Yes, kinda obvious (Bungie hasn't cancelled anything yet, btw) but my question isn't that, it's why Concords failure made them look at that they were making and thinking "Nah, not worth it." but HD2's success didn't do the opposite.
Were the offerings just more generic shooters? No room for them?
We know one was a God of War MP spinoff of some kind and that doesn't seem generic but also hard to imagine. Certainly more room for that then a extraction shooter or a heist game.
We also had cancellations of a lot of live service games that were years into development. Factions and whatever live service titles Bluepoint and Bend were working on. So that's also quite a lot of money invested which resulted in nothing at all. So much nothing that Sony has to rely a lot on third parties to secure enough exclusive content these days.
GT7 is the best!
