Sony’s GAAS Push Is Coming to a Crash

It was almost sound logic on Sony’s part. If you can make a single Fortnite, it doesn’t matter if there are a dozen failures. Fortnite is that big. So big in fact, that it takes more than a dozen failures to dethrone it.

Why don’t people want to play games that are trying to steal oxygen from Fortnite and Call of Duty? Because they’re playing Fortnite and Call of Duty. They’re already in those ecosystems, they’ve already put a billion hours in them. Even if they look away for a second, they’ll come running back for a team-up with the Ninja Turtles.

It’s not just Sony. The entire industry seemed to be full of execs shrugging their shoulders, rolling up their sleeves and in a booming voice commanding their tired peons to make another once-in-a-lifetime forever game. The vast majority of them have failed. Only Sony tore up their apparent unique selling point to do so.

I say apparent for obvious reasons: the PlayStation sells with or without internal exclusives. It’s the default AAA console and it’ll stay that way probably forever. But exclusives serve to give character to your ecosystem. If you were to ask a PlayStation fan why he bought a PlayStation there’s a decent chance he’d roll his eyes and say for The Last of Us and God of War and Spider-Man and every other major IP. They wouldn’t be right, but they wouldn’t be wrong.

Now there are rumours that their next GAAS title, Marathon, is dead on arrival or delayed. Jade Raymond left her studio and its game, Fairgames – reportedly a mix between The Division and Fortnite – failed to excite play testers. Recently a God of War game made by Bluepoint was supposedly cancelled too.

Sony’s GAAS Initiative Was a Major Mistake

If what you’re lo0king for is a major best-in-class single player action game developed by a Sony studio, the last title that would have caught your attention would have been Spider-Man 2, released in October 2023. Other titles, including the wonderful Astro Bot, may have caught your attention. But they don’t necessarily fit that definition, and doubly so if you want something more mature.

Death Stranding 2 and The Ghost of Yotei are on the horizon, so the drought is likely over. For now. But it’s going to take years for the impact of Sony’s GAAS push to subside. What will there be to show for it? Helldivers 2. And maybe Marathon.

The idea that all you have to do is luck into a Fortnite is proof if proof is needed that executives don’t live in the real world and don’t always understand their audience. This won’t hurt PlayStation, not really. There’s nothing anybody can do to topple that tower, outside of wait for the inevitable disappearance of consoles. The PlayStation 6 will be a harder sell than the PlayStation 5, and it’ll only get harder from there.

People want Sony to make great games. No, they want Sony to make the great games, and that’s an article in itself. What nobody needs is another Fortnite. It’s laughable to even try.