After a high-profile failure in Harmony and a high-profile success in Astro Bot final 12 months, PlayStation is trying to alter its technique to include fewer stay service video games, extra large franchises, and stricter oversight of its owned studios.
In an interview with Financial Times, PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst says the corporate is hoping to mitigate future large, costly dangers with future video games. “I don’t need groups to all the time play it protected, however I would love for us, once we fail, to fail early and cheaply.”
Harmony was not an inexpensive failure. Analysts estimate Sony spent round $250m on the sport, just for it to promote so poorly that Sony shut it down two weeks after launch, and shuttered its developer, Firewalk Studios, not lengthy after. Against this, Astro Bot additionally launched final 12 months to common acclaim, successful a number of awards and selling 2.3 million copies as of March 2025, one of many best-selling video games on PlayStation 5.
The variations between the 2 video games are myriad, definitely, and their improvement tales are fairly completely different as nicely. However what Hulst has taken away from that is that there must be extra supervision of Sony’s owned studios to make sure that video games veering within the path of Harmony are noticed earlier than they change into costly failures, to allow them to be canceled or corrected in time.
“We now have since put in place far more rigorous and extra frequent testing in very many various methods,” Hulst mentioned. “The benefit of each failure . . . is that folks now perceive how essential that [oversight] is.”
Monetary Occasions spoke to a number of Sony studio heads, who mentioned that this oversight means extra deal with group testing, extra communication between inner Sony studios, and nearer relationships between the studios’ high executives. “If we’re heading in direction of a large landmine, like there’s one other studio making precisely the identical sport, that’s good info,” mentioned Jason Connell, artwork director at Ghost of Yōtei studio Sucker Punch.
That remark rings particularly poignant in gentle of Concord’s failure, which analysts say occurred for a lot of causes, together with an oversaturation of multiplayer, stay service shooters. Hulst suggests within the interview that PlayStation is not as intent on churning out stay service video games because it was. That mentioned, PlayStation does have Bungie’s Marathon arising earlier than March 2026, a sport that has a lot of Bungie followers involved amid delays, employees layoffs, and a basic lack of understanding as to what the sport entails.
However there’s one other technique Hulst additionally needs to pursue: he needs extra, large Sony IP. Astro Bot’s success has come about over the course of a number of video games, with the little robotic icon rising in recognition every time. In response to Monetary Occasions, Hulst needs studios to be serious about how their IP might be changed into larger and larger franchises over time, following within the footsteps of The Final of Us and Uncharted. “We take a really intentional strategy to IP creation . . . understanding how a brand new idea can flip into an iconic franchise for PlayStation, that may then once more change into a franchise for individuals past gaming,” he mentioned.
Presently on the docket, PlayStation has Ghost of Yōtei and Misplaced Soul Apart coming this 12 months, with Marvel Tōkon: Combating Souls and Housemarque’s Saros for 2026. Different video games akin to Fairgames, Marvel’s Wolverine, Naughty Canine’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Marathon, and extra stay within the works.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Yow will discover her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Acquired a narrative tip? Ship it to rvalentine@ign.com.