Sony CFO says its live service shift is ‘not entirely going smoothly’ but pledges to carry on and learn from mistakes
Lin Tao says progress has been made despite “somewhat negative news” caused by Concord and Marathon
Sony’s chief financial officer says the company will learn from its live service failures, but insists that progress has been made despite them.
In a Q&A session following the company’s latest financial results, one caller asked its panel of executives for an update on the current status of PlayStation‘s live service plan, and where it sees the issues when it comes to improving its live service games.
Sony CFO Lin Tao replied that despite the negativity surrounding Sony’s live service offerings thanks to the issues with Concord and Marathon, she still believes live service games are worthwhile because they’ve added a revenue stream that didn’t exist for the company five years ago.
“Last year Concord [shut down], and this year Marathon was postponed, so somewhat negative news has been coming out,” Tao said (via an interpreter).
“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 had earlier noted during Sony’s results presentation that live service games accounted for around 40% of first-party software revenue for the past quarter, and cited this again in her reply.
“For Q1 the live service ratio was about 40%, for the full year it’s a little less, probably between 20-30%,” she said. “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.”
Sony has seen numerous other roadblocks regarding its live service games beyond the more high-profile examples of Concord’s closure and Marathon’s delay.
In January it was reported that Sony had cancelled live service games in development at Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games, a report which was confirmed by a Sony spokesperson. It was then claimed by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier that Bluepoint’s game was a live service God of War title.
It was then reported that Fairgame$, a live service mutliplayer heist game from Sony and Haven Studios, had been internally delayed into 2026.
It’s not all been bad new for Sony’s live service offering, however. Helldivers 2, which was developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, was one of the biggest surprise hits of last year, becoming PlayStation’s fastest selling game of all time and selling more than 15 million copies by the end of 2024.
