Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
Sony spent up to $400 million making a single video game. It sold 25,000 copies in 14 days before Sony pulled it from sale. Cost per copy sold: about $16,000. The studio shut down two months later. The executive who warned them had already been fired for saying no.
The game was Concord. The executive was Shuhei Yoshida, who ran Sony's in-house game studios for 11 years and helped ship some of the biggest PlayStation hits ever: God of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Ghost of Tsushima. These are games you buy once and finish. Sony made billions on that model. Spider-Man alone generated $315 million in digital sales. The Last of Us 2 pulled nearly $250 million. God of War Ragnarok sold 15 million copies, with $279 million from digital downloads alone.
Then in 2019, a new CEO took over PlayStation. Jim Ryan wanted Sony's studios to stop making those kinds of games and chase a different model: live service. Live service is Fortnite's model: games designed to keep you playing and paying forever, earning money through endless small purchases instead of one-time sales. Ryan told his team to ship 12 of these by 2025.
Yoshida refused. Ryan removed him from running the studios and gave him a choice: take a smaller role working with indie developers or leave the company. Yoshida took the role and stayed at Sony for another six years. At an industry event in Australia last weekend, he finally said plainly that Ryan fired him from running the studios for refusing to do the 'ridiculous things' Ryan had demanded.
Of those 12 live service games, 8 were cancelled before they ever came out. Naughty Dog killed a Last of Us multiplayer game in late 2023. Bend Studio's sci-fi game died in January 2025. Twisted Metal and a London fantasy game were both scrapped in early 2024, and the London studio was closed. Insomniac's Spider-Man multiplayer was abandoned. A God of War live service game was cancelled, then the studio making it (Bluepoint) was shut down this past February. A Destiny spin-off was scrapped. Deviation Games, a studio Sony had partnered with, was shut down before shipping anything.
Only one of the 12 actually worked. Helldivers 2 was a big hit. But the studio that made it, Arrowhead, isn't owned by Sony, and they've already said they won't partner with Sony on their next game.
The total damage under Ryan: $3.7 billion spent buying Bungie (the studio behind Destiny), up to $400 million written off on Concord, and roughly 1,500 jobs lost across studios that got shut down. The PS5 generation is now short on the kind of games that built PlayStation in the first place.
Yoshida was pushed out in 2019 for saying no to one strategy. Five years and a few billion dollars later, Sony's current CEO says the new plan is to 'fail early and fail cheaply.'
