Will Sony pivot to making more Astro Bot-style games, or is the future all live service?

We need more Astro Bot-style games and less Concord.

Astro Bot / Sony Interactive Entertainment

Concord was recently delisted in record time, after an awful beta. You could argue that the writing was on the wall, but it rocked the gaming industry. After all, Redfall might’ve been a contentious release for Xbox, but it still achieved almost three times more concurrent Steam players at its peak than Concord did. A major platform holder having such a publicly ridiculed release is big news, and yet it was still washed away by the release of Astro Bot.

PlayStation fans have been heralding Astro Bot as a game of the year contender, and one of the best first-party PlayStation games for years. I quite like Astro Bot – not as much as most critics, admittedly – and I think it’s a good game, but it’s a left-field release for PlayStation. This isn’t a third-person over-the-shoulder shooter-action hybrid with skill trees and a crafting system, which basically makes it the Holy Grail of PlayStation’s first-party line up. So, are we going to get more of this, or more of Concord?

Originally Sony had 12 – that’s right, twelve – live service games in the pipes intended to be released in a relatively short period of time. We have since had confirmation that a The Last of Us multiplayer game has been cancelled, and only six live service PS5 titles are on track to launch by March 2026. Two of those released this year: the massively successful Helldivers 2, and the monumental disaster that was Concord.

Concord didn't last long. / Firewalk

Helldivers 2 was a sensation, and you can tell why after a quick play session. It feels unlike any other third-person shooter, the gameplay is limited to co-op online – which is a fantastic decision – and the tone of the action always manages to stay slapstick, no matter how intense it gets. There’s no other live service game quite like it, and that’s why it is still going strong, even after Sony nearly sabotaged Helldivers 2 on PC with forced PSN accounts. 

Concord, meanwhile, was plagued by comparisons to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Blizzard’s Overwatch from the moment it was shown off. The gaming world collectively groaned at the words “5v5 multiplayer FPS” after a fancy debut cinematic, a beta was arranged shortly after, and even when it opened up access to all PS+ players the servers still felt barren. The game was dead on arrival, and somehow everyone knew it but Sony. Not even a roadmap can save that one.

Concord was the debut game for Firewalk Studios, which was formed in 2018, and the game was conceived around two years prior. That’s at least six years of practical, hard work on a game that was available to play for barely two weeks. Sony only acquired Firewalk in April 2023, so it might not seem like a monumental time investment for the publisher, but for the team at the studio, this has been the worst possible scenario, after six years of work.

Helldivers 2 was a massive success. / Arrowhead / Sony

Sony plans ahead, but manages to be a reactive company. It was quick to capitalize on/destroy the success of Helldivers 2 with enforced PSN accounts (limiting the game’s global availability), it didn’t hesitate to take down Concord when things weren’t going well in the early days, The Last of Us’ multiplayer game got canned after draining resources, and delayed six of those aforementioned live service games when things weren’t looking so good. Now all Sony needs to do is double-down on games people are actually asking for.

So let’s take a step back – Astro Bot is a game that was made by Team Asobi in around three years. At a Metacritic score of 94, it sits right alongside God of War: Ragnarok critically. Again, it can’t be understated: Astro Bot was such a refreshing release from Sony that it managed to erase Concord’s failure from public consciousness. With all of that in mind, it’s time for Sony executives to once again recalibrate the strategy for the future.

Instead of forcing a suite of 12 live service games onto a market that is getting increasingly tired of them – or the remaining nine, I suppose – let’s change things up. Why doesn’t Sony make some quality single-player experiences? They don’t even have to be open world, RPGs, or shooters, as Astro Bot proves. If you just make a good game that feels a bit unlike anything else you could play instead, the people will come, and the consoles will sell.

We need more Astro Bot-style games from Sony. / Sony Interactive Entertainment

The PS4 dominated the last console generation thanks to Sony’s laundry list of Oscar-bait single-player games, and even though I’m sick of them, they sold consoles. They made the PS4 an essential – Call of Duty and Overwatch were just other games you could also play, if you wanted. You bought the console for those premium experiences that you can’t play anywhere else. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if the PS5 Pro actually had a new game to showcase its upgraded visual capabilities, instead of an upgraded port of a PS4 game everyone has already played, people would be more eager to actually buy it. Instead, it’s a $700 console with the same games.

I don’t know how long it’ll take the revelation of Astro Bot to actually impact the games we see from Sony this generation – if we even see the effects this generation – but I take Astro Bot as proof that people are willing to play games with unique art styles that don’t fit neatly into one of the three established triple-A genres (FPS games, RPGs, and third-person action. Sometimes all three at once.).

There are dozens of op-eds online that bemoaned Sony’s live-service strategy back when it was announced, and those writers can feel pretty smug right about now. The question is, is there time for Sony to change gears, or are we due to watch nine more Concords drown in the swamp of the PlayStation Store?