PlayStation Throws A ‘God Of War’ Game In Its Live Service Graveyard

Sony has been pushing toward making more and more live service games despite its single-player history. Though increasingly it feels like they are Sisyphus pushing the boulder.

A new Bloomberg report says that Sony has cancelled yet another pair of live service games, one from Bend, and the other from Bluepoint, was apparently an unannounced God of War multiplayer game.

It’s the latest misstep in this live service strategy which has produced one very high profile hit, the co-op, microtransaction-lite Helldivers 2, and a pile of other cancellations and failures.

These two now-dead games now join a host of other cancelled live service games including The Last of Us Online, Twisted Metal, Spider-Man: The Great Web a London Studios live game and Deviation Games’ multiplayer game.

There are increasingly few known games in the pipeline, two from Bungie, which seem destined to at least make it to release, Marathon and the unannounced but internally promising MOBA codenamed Gummy Bears. There are supposedly two Horizon Zero Dawn-based multiplayer games in the works that still exist. And there is Fairgame$, the Haven studios heist game that was not well-received during its reveal and has gone dark ever since. If another game is going to soon be on the chopping block, it may this be this one.

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Of course, all these alive and dead games are in the shadow of Concord, the hero shooter that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and years of work to be summarily killed just two weeks after launch due to a disastrous reception, failing to break even a thousand concurrent players on Steam when even Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched with an (also terrible) 13,000. Sony no doubt wants to avoid another situation like that, and they may be axing games left and right to escape that possibility.

And...a God of War live service game? There is no doubt that would have been received with a whole lot of groaning from the playerbase, given that all anyone wants is for Kratos to show up and start killing Egyptian gods in a new single player game. Yes, God of War Ascension had multiplayer in 2012, but that hardly seems like the model for something people would want en masse now, and there’s probably a reason GoW never had that again.

All of this is part of Sony’s allegedly necessary idea that it needs to branch out past single-player games largely locked to its console base, despite how well-received they are or how many copies they may move. The plan was to release a bunch of live service games to print revenue on PlayStation and PC, but that idea only works if those games are…good. The cancelled ones, presumably, were not, and of its high-profile projects in this era, they have one hit offset a few months later by possibly the biggest launch disaster in video game history.

The desire to move past just single player games may be understandable in 2025, but creating successful live service games is threading a needle, and in some instances may be costing more than it’s worth. The idea may be to try to find one Fortnite out of 20 failures, but it’s hard to say that this is going well whatsoever past one main game at present.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.