In the pantheon of great video game trailers—and many make the cut—Marathon’s 2022 announcement trailer stands out as something close to pure art. The 1-minute-and-41-second-long promo starts with a fluorescent green mushroom exploding into powdery spores. Thereafter, we see tiny robotic bugs, a little like silkworms, weaving a synthetic body into existence; then, nameless figures sprinting through a pristine sci-fi corridor to a pulsing electronic score. The trailer ends outside with a long-range sniper kill: the stillness of a downed body framed by a massive extraterrestrial sky. On YouTube, the trailer is accompanied by the evocative hashtag “SomewhereInTheHeavens.” Yes, that seems right.
Rarely, if ever, has a highly anticipated game come crashing back down to planet Earth in as miserable a fashion as Marathon subsequently did. The highs of the ravishing 2022 trailer gave way to the lows of an alpha play test in April 2025: Feedback was so bad that the online multiplayer shooter, initially slated for a September 23 release, was delayed indefinitely (though it’s undergoing a new technical test this week in a bid to address that poor reception). The extraction shooter from the creators of the Halo and Destiny franchises certainly looked the part of a Bungie game—Y2K-tinged psychedelia with a dollop of eco-weirdness—and as expected from the illustrious studio, the gunplay felt snappy and satisfying. But the extraction shooter loop simply didn’t have the juice: Maps seemed empty, and losing all your loot at the hands of another human felt brutally unforgiving. To make matters worse, the game became embroiled in an art-theft scandal (Bungie admitted to finding stolen 2017 art assets by graphic designer Antireal), which torpedoed the goodwill that remained. For a new live-service game, cultural cachet is king: If the vibes are off, as they are here, then it can be difficult to convince players to migrate en masse to your online offering. To put it frankly, the mood around Marathon was—and remains—toxic.
The tribulations of Marathon—Bungie’s new flagship live-service title, following the studio’s $3.6 billion acquisition by Sony in 2022 and subsequent revenue shortfalls and layoffs—are part of the larger story of live-service strife surrounding its parent company. For the past half decade, Sony has spent billions to propel itself into this “forever game” market—i.e., live-service titles that are maintained (and that, in theory, generate revenue) over many years. But it has repeatedly failed in spectacular fashion. Hero shooter Concord launched in August 2024 but peaked at fewer than 700 concurrent players on Steam and was delisted within a matter of weeks, reportedly costing Sony $400 million. And then there’s the slew of rumored or confirmed cancellations: a Horizon MMO, a God of War live-service title, the long-in-development Last of Us online project. Of the 12 live-service titles Jim Ryan, former PlayStation CEO, bullishly proclaimed were in production in 2022, only one of them, Helldivers 2 (from third-party developer Arrowhead Game Studios), has been a certified hit.
But Sony’s current position is somewhat contradictory: It’s both a loser and a winner. Through its place as the dominant home console and platform maker (sales of the PlayStation 4 and 5 total over 169 million units), the company has found itself immeasurably enriched by the online gaming boom, skimming 30 percent off not just each game sale but each microtransaction, which makes up the vast bulk of revenue for live-service titles. Due to both gameplay and social dynamics, players have habitually returned to the likes of Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto Online, and Minecraft for close to a decade. To some, this cohort of evergreen, ongoing games represents a calcification within the industry: Players are gathering around old favorites at the expense of seeking out new experiences (recent data suggests that most players purchase two or fewer titles per year). Now, even Sony, perhaps the most respected publisher in the world, is struggling to penetrate this ossified live-service market because players’ routines, by design, have hardened.
In recent months, I’ve asked a variety of developers, players, and commentators to weigh in on a simple topic: Sony and online multiplayer—both its present plight and its historical track record. Most agreed about the current mess; others suggested online multiplayer has never truly been part of the company’s creative DNA. A few told me illuminating stories about how they rallied against limitations in telecommunications infrastructure and netcode to deliver groundbreaking online experiences.
One of these people is Shawn Layden, the former PlayStation Studios boss and Ryan’s direct predecessor. He’s commonly credited with spearheading the prestige single-player hits of the PlayStation 4 era, including Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, and God of War. But toward the end of his tenure, in 2019, Layden also green-lit Helldivers 2 (and acquired Spider-Man studio Insomniac Games and established PlayStation Productions). “That’s on me,” the 64-year-old says with a smile, clearly proud of his parting shot.
But for all Helldivers 2’s success (the game launched in February 2024 and was still the third-most-played game on Steam in June 2025), Layden doesn’t pull his punches about his former employer’s live-service pivot—or any other company’s, for that matter. He says the “siren’s call” of live-service gaming has “ensorcelled” many in game management for the past several years. “It’s like a mirage on the top of a sand dune. You pursue it. You can’t quite get there. Or if you do get there, what you brought to the party no one wants to play anyway.”
“It's this very small list of winners, and they all won five, six years ago,” says Justin Richmond, multiplayer designer on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and game director on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. “It’s this sort of dystopian nightmare/dream of multiplayer. The upside is I have a group of friends I play with, we all play a game together, and we have an ongoing experience. I still love that stuff. But the downside is that I have no time to try new experiences, and so therefore I don't, and therefore the whole industry is slowly collapsing in on itself.”
This consolidation has taken years. One might be tempted to think teleologically about Sony’s current woes—that the seeds of its online multiplayer struggles, partly explained by its belated entry into the live-service space, can be traced back to the two built-in controller ports of the PlayStation 1 and 2 consoles themselves, versus the four of the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, Sega Dreamcast, and Microsoft Xbox. Has Sony ever been that invested in multiplayer? Indeed, one might reasonably ask, has Sony ever truly had a smash online multiplayer title to rival Microsoft's groundbreaking first-person shooter Halo 2 or even Nintendo’s racing phenomenon Mario Kart 8?
The answer is no, but for a time in the 2000s, Sony led the nascent race for online multiplayer on consoles, picking up the mantle from a failing Dreamcast (whose daring ad campaign promised online play with “up to 6 billion players”). That early period was “scary as hell,” recalls Layden, who was then vice president of PlayStation’s European division. He and his colleagues were blissfully ignorant of the online challenges they faced. “You just run into the burning house, confident you can find your way out,” he says.
On March 4, 2000, Tokyo’s streets were lined with gargantuan billboards announcing the arrival of the PlayStation 2. Akihabara, the city’s electronics district, was humming before stores even opened, and players were fervently excited about experiencing the console’s much-hyped Emotion Engine. But despite long-held rumors and early announcements, one of the console's much-touted features was missing: The PlayStation 2 wasn’t internet-ready, at least not yet.
Online connectivity didn’t arrive in Japan until the later release of a 56k modem connected via USB. In the U.S., where the PlayStation 2 launched on October 26, 2000, online services launched in August 2002. Players had to awkwardly bolt a network adapter to the back of their consoles to gain broadband connectivity. This additive nature made online functionality feel like an afterthought. But it wasn’t, says Seth Luisi, a producer at Sony at the time. He recalls an impressively modern vision for a home console from the then-CEO of PlayStation Entertainment America, Ken Kutaragi: something akin to a “home PC,” with a keyboard, a mouse, internet, and a built-in hard drive alongside the two controller ports and traditional memory cards.
Luisi, a warm and effusive 52-year-old, recalls the era fondly. He was barely in his 20s when working alongside longtime PlayStation console architect Mark Cerny on the original 1998 Spyro the Dragon. But the bigger break for Luisi came in writing the concept for 2002’s SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs, a third-person tactical shooter in the vein of Counter-Strike, and undeniably the breakout hit of Sony’s initial online offerings. “This was all leading up to the release of the PS2,” he says. “The idea of the network adapter was always there, so I really pushed to have a 16-player online experience, and I really wanted to do integrated voice chat.” As a producer, he had to contact some 30 developers he thought would do a good job making it; the game needed a PS2-compatible headset, so Luisi also liaised with Logitech. Finally, he had to pitch the bundled game and headset to Jack Tretton, who was then Sony’s VP of sales. Tretton, suitably impressed, “substantially” increased the initial order size.
In the modern era of more seamless, streamlined online play, when every game is looped into wider platform operations (friend lists and the like), it’s remarkable to hear that Luisi, the studio contracted to make SOCOM (Zipper Interactive), and all of the other studios working on online games (such as Twisted Metal: Black Online) were essentially left to their own devices by Sony. “It really was the vision of the time to not have a centralized approach to online,” says Luisi. “For better or worse, that's what it was, and so every game had its own log-in [and] online system. None of it was tied together. There was no back-end support from Sony.”
This extended to the hosting of actual online games. Server infrastructure for gaming was virtually nonexistent. Instead, explains SOCOM creative director David Sears, matches were “remotely hosted” by one of the 16 players on their actual PlayStation 2. “Everyone else was just being synced” to this one player, he explains. Sears contended that a centralized server would deliver the best performance with the least lag, but one of his engineers believed in the remote host workaround. “It was an imperfect solution executed brilliantly,” says Sears.
SOCOM became the poster child of Sony’s foray into online console gaming, enjoying lavish write-ups in magazines before racking up 2 million sales in just over a year. It helped that the game was meticulously researched by Sears and arrived as other military-themed entertainment like Black Hawk Down was proving popular amid the U.S. pursuit of a global war on terrorism. The game was reviewed positively, albeit not without criticism (to be “enjoyed by anyone who has a broadband connection,” wrote GameSpot; “done better elsewhere,” withered Eurogamer). But SOCOM functioned as a proof of concept for a groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting idea: that a console shooter could work, and even thrive, online.
But just a couple of years later, in 2004, Sony’s new rival, Microsoft, one-upped SOCOM to deliver the definitive online multiplayer experience on console. Intergalactic shooter Halo 2 debuted to near-universal acclaim (IGN described it as a “noble achievement in storytelling, gameplay balance, and multiplayer design”). The game was, first and foremost, a great competitive shooter before Bungie added a plethora of extras to make it an even more compelling, long-lasting time sink: deep customization options for your soldier’s looks and social features that piggybacked off of Xbox Live’s infrastructure, such as the ability to form (and seamlessly fight) clans and less formal parties.
None of this was the least bit surprising, explains Layden, who—along with his colleagues—watched Microsoft with curiosity, if not worry. “These are the Internet Explorer people; they’re going to take you to the internet,” he explains thinking at the time. “That seemed to be one of their advantages versus pure console players like we were at PlayStation.”
Microsoft wasn’t just busy making innovative games: The console itself—or rather, the software installed on it—was increasingly designed to keep players gaming for longer. With the release of the Xbox 360 in November 2005, the company introduced the Gamerscore, which added an ingenious meta wrinkle to the simple act of gaming by letting players accrue points through achievements. Tom Bramwell, editor-in-chief of Eurogamer from 2008 to 2014, describes Gamerscore as an “enormous enabler” of online community. “As much as cerebral journalists and critics liked to poo-poo it,” he says, “everyone kind of cared about their Gamerscore.” It provided a means for Microsoft to incentivize players to log on, stay connected, and stick with their Xbox 360 (beyond acclaimed games like Halo 3 and Gears of War).
Something was in the water: In 2007, military shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare—a game whose success reverberated throughout the industry, including at Sony-owned studios—brought its own inventive perks-based approach to tracking player progression across multiplayer modes. Senior leadership at Naughty Dog—Evan Wells, Christophe Balestra, and more—were friendly with Infinity Ward, the studio behind Call of Duty, often visiting to play their games and share development techniques. They saw online multiplayer not just as a fun, competitive addition to Uncharted 2, but as a way to keep players engaged. The 30-year-old Richmond, who would go on to play a leading role on Uncharted 3, was hired and moved across the country—from Annapolis, Maryland to Santa Monica, California—to help make Uncharted multiplayer a reality. “It was becoming obvious that rentals, even back then, were killing us in terms of sales,” says Richmond. “We wanted to make something awesome, but we also wanted a reason to keep the disc in the drive.”
So Richmond designed and built a perks system in the wake of Modern Warfare’s. “I was envious of how awesome that stuff was,” he says, noting that it took him a “nightmarishly long time” to figure out how to actually devise and execute it in Uncharted 2. The team, a tiny enclave composed of Richmond, Balestra, Robert Cogburn, and Dan Liebgold, also took “a lot” from Bungie. “We had played a ton of Halo, and so we actually used a similar ELO [ranking] system for our matchmaking,” continues Richmond. “We tried to make it fair.” In fact, the team interfaced with Bungie, which had split with Microsoft in 2007, for the inside scoop on its netcode, i.e., its method of connecting players across the internet. “Chris Butcher [an engineering lead at Bungie] got on the phone and was like, ‘Here’s how I set this up,’” recalls Richmond. “He literally told us how he wrote the code for the multiplayer.”
Uncharted 2’s multiplayer found an audience, but it was niche—between 4,000 and 6,000 concurrent players at its peak, recalls Richmond. “It was nothing compared to Call of Duty. It was nothing compared to the competitors,” he says. “But I was proud of it. I mean, we were worried that no one would play it.” Compared to the acclaimed single-player campaign, it was a curio—a pursuit primarily for the hardcore. The imbalance in resources, between the lavishly funded single-player and the skeleton crew creating the multiplayer, was indicative of the path Sony would take over the coming years.
Gamerscore and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare helped lay the foundation for the attention-devouring live-service landscape of today. In the military shooter, players could frag through 55 ranking levels before doing it all again in “prestige” mode. The process could be repeated up to 10 times, with each completed run conferring a new insignia on the player: a medal of honor, so to speak. Fundamentally, Infinity Ward made players feel good about spending tens, if not hundreds, of hours with the game—and Microsoft did exactly the same via Gamerscore, pulling users ever deeper into the orbit of its Xbox device with a numerical indicator of their dedication to gaming.
Meta gameplay components like these have since infiltrated many of our everyday activities, whether we think of them as taking place predominantly online or not. We accrue clout through followers on social media, enjoy gamified exercise through Peloton, and obsessively log the movies we’ve watched on Letterboxd. This new frontier in console gaming in the latter half of the 2000s didn’t just set the stage for live-service gaming in the years to come; to a large degree, it was also the canary in the coal mine of our modern, engagement-obsessed world, where competing technology companies (including those that make video games) vie for our attention every waking second.
Live-service games look much the same as their single-player counterparts. A player-controlled, third-person avatar—or, simply, an arm clutching a finely modeled gun—likely sits at the center of the screen, traversing some wondrous space that strains the physical laws of our own universe." But the skillset involved in actually making these games—of designing one to be played at most a handful of times, and the other, in perpetuity—could scarcely be more different. Joost van Dreunen, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of the SuperJoost Playlist newsletter, sums up the distinction succinctly. “Running a live-service game is more like running a theme park than shipping a movie,” he tells me. “It takes years of practice, not just big budgets.”
For many years, Sony found great success with its movie-like model of making games. Since 2014, the company has been nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards 12 times—more than any other publisher—and won on three occasions (God of War in 2018, The Last of Us Part II in 2020, and Astro Bot in 2024). Layden can take a great deal of credit for this run as the head of PlayStation during many of those years. He notes that these critically acclaimed games were also often commercial juggernauts: Five of the 10 bestselling PlayStation 4 titles were developed in-house. Even as live-service competitors like Fortnite and GTA Online raked in billions, Layden felt little jealousy or anxiety. “Of course we took all the information in,” he says, “but my view at the time was, ‘We’re super strong on single-player. We have the best narrative in the business.’ It was a case of, ‘I’m doing The Last of Us—that’s where we swim. I’m gonna do Spider-Man.’”
Moreover, suggests Layden, it wasn’t immediately apparent that the live-service behemoths that now dominated in terms of both player count and revenue were ever going to become so successful. Fortnite famously launched for $40 in July 2017 with just a single mode, “Save the World”: a cooperative, objective-based game in which four players could team up to fight quasi-zombies, save survivors, collect resources, build shelters, and repel a devastating storm. Within months, its maker, Epic, inspired by the gargantuan success of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (now known as PUBG: Battlegrounds), added a new battle royale mode. As a result, the game jumped from some one million cumulative players in its first month to one million in just the first day of its battle royale mode (and 10 million within the first two weeks). “Fortnite is the classic example of catching lightning in a jar,” says Layden. “You can't plan for that. You can't prepare for that. You can't envision that.”
GTA Online—a game that has historically earned its publisher half a billion dollars in revenue every year, and whose ongoing success is likely a major reason why players are having to wait 13 years for GTA 6—launched in 2013 in similarly underwhelming fashion. It took many years to recover. The major live-service sports franchises—EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA), NBA 2K, and Madden NFL—all began offline before incorporating live-service elements, including the contentious inclusion of gambling-like loot boxes. “Either you are dozens of years in the making,” Layden says of live-service success, “or you get one lucky dip.”
Yet there is no denying these types of games’ ascension in the 2010s. Their astronomical success caused “a lot of strategic discussions” at Sony concerning Layden’s decision to pursue single-player titles. Ultimately, he left the company in 2019 because it was intent on pursuing a live-service strategy. “Not my skillset,” he says bluntly. But neither were these the types of experiences Layden was interested in creating, from a philosophical perspective. “A live-service game to me isn't really a game,” he says. “It’s a repetitive action engagement device.”
“For me, a game—because of where I come from—means I need three things. I need a story, I need a character, and I need a world. And Horizon, God of War, and Uncharted have all three of those things,” he says. “If you're doing a live-service game, you just need a repetitive action that most people can get their head around, an ability to communicate in that world with other like-minded people, and [the player’s] desire to do it again and again and again.”
Layden’s framing of a live-service game as a “repetitive action engagement device,” in contrast to a traditional single-player title, reflects the higher value he places on linear, conventional narratives compared to the messier, multifaceted, Gen Z-player-authored experiences that emerge on Fornite, Minecraft, and Roblox (and then often spill onto YouTube). The phrase also satirizes how his former executive colleagues see their games. Describing the making of Marathon in a business briefing, PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst referred to “constant testing” and “constant revalidation of assumptions.” He described development as a feedback loop between player and developer: a cycle of “test, of iterate, of test again,” he said, is a “key component of the live-service success—both leading up to launch, but also throughout the life of the game.” In Hulst’s prepared speech, fun, entertainment, and excitement were not name-checked as primary goals. Instead, he sought to “maximize engagement and player satisfaction.”
Hulst’s words and the high-profile flops of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Marvel's Avengers, and Concord speak to why players have become so suspicious of live-service titles. These are games in which telemetry (i.e., the accrual of in-game, real-time player data) is used not just to fine-tune gameplay but to keep players plugged in. This strategy can feel like corporate overreach: a particularly rapacious, modern form of capitalism sullying players’ increasingly precious leisure time. Perhaps this is the result of an executive landscape that, according to Layden’s characterization, is run more by “business” people than “creative.”
Thanks to Sony’s console-market-leading position, its live-service woes may hardly even matter. The company, which has also invested $1.45 billion in Fortnite-maker Epic, could simply be too big to fail. Speaking about Sony’s many live-service failures and rumored cancellations, van Dreunen says, “They sting, but they’re not fatal.” That’s because Sony still makes most of its money from hardware sales, cuts of third-party software sales, and single-player hits like Ghost of Yotei. “Even if live service fizzles, the PS5 business is strong,” he says. “The real risk isn’t collapse—it’s wasted time and money that could’ve gone into what Sony already does best.”
Last November, Sony president Hiroki Totoki called single-player games “our strengths” and said they “have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP.” As for live-service projects, which Totoki said “pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk,” van Dreunen continues, “They’re cutting scope, not quitting. Half the slate is gone, Marathon is delayed, and leadership now talks about ‘failing fast.’ Think less of a [live-service] flood, more of a trickle.”
Ethan Gach, a senior reporter at Kotaku, opts for another metaphor to describe the current state of Sony’s online strategy. “It’s like a plane that left the tarmac and immediately one of the engines caught fire, and then it’s just circling the airport,” he says. “There's both the wreck analogy, but also the failure-to-launch analogy.”
Richmond stresses “it’s not just Sony” that's flailing. One of the projects dropped in Microsoft's recent round of cuts was a new MMO being created by ZeniMax. Ubisoft launched the free-to-play FPS XDefiant, only to shut it down within six months. Electronic Arts pivoted Dragon Age: The Veilguard away from live service into a single-player game mid-development. Capcom also reportedly started work on Resident Evil Requiem as an open-world, live service–style title before shifting its focus back to single player.
“The highway is littered with people wanting to take on Fortnite, with people trying to do Overwatch with different skins,” says Layden. These blunders make a mockery of the notion that live service is a Band-Aid for the unsustainable costs of blockbuster game development—that recurring revenues offset the risk of increasingly expensive productions. Rather than stanching the economic bleeding of commercial game production, these titles have become yet another outlet of bloodshed for both the companies themselves and the individual developers laid off as a result of these risky gambits failing.
“If you're trying to go into that space because you have this illusion in your mind of big sacks of money coming every day for the rest of your life, for most it doesn't happen,” says Layden.
But neither is live-service gaming going away. Players, whose purchasing power has been poleaxed by a cost-of-living crisis and is now being further reduced by the effects of new tariffs, have flocked to ongoing free-to-play titles like the open-world RPG Genshin Impact. This is another reason why some commentators, including Gach, think Marathon may struggle: The game, described as a “premium experience,” will reportedly cost $40.
How does Sony compete with ostensibly free-to-play games whose players have nonetheless sunk hundreds of dollars into their skin collection? How does the company draw players away from franchises that they have been playing with friends for more than 10 years? Arguably, less with experiences that seek to “maximize engagement and player satisfaction” and more with those that are deliriously fun, captivatingly imaginative, and brilliantly compelling—preferably all at once.
Live-service games are, by their always-online nature, intensely social. Sony, it seems, must generate FOMO through means other than aping prior genre conventions (the hero shooter in Concord’s case; the extraction shooter in Marathon’s) and peppering games with loot boxes, cosmetic skins, and brain-massaging perk systems—the de facto accoutrements of online games. For Sony, Helldivers 2 has been one bright spot: an example of fundamental design wit and sheer anarchic online fun, whose supersized spectacle has generated no end of YouTube montages (and, for a brief moment in September, was catapulted into mainstream news).
Here’s the kicker: For its next title, developer Arrowhead has decided to part ways with Sony and strike out on its own.
