Sony boss doubles down on live service games after cancelling 8 of 12 planned titles and killing Destiny 2

Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino says the company is staying the course on live service games — even after cancelling eight of the 12 live service titles it had planned for 2025 and shutting down Destiny 2, a game that took most of Bungie's workforce with it.

In a Famitsu interview, Nishino said Sony sees live service games as "content that attracts users on a global level" and wants to keep pushing the genre through both first-party and third-party releases. He added that Sony isn't just focused on new launches but is also thinking about what it can do with older titles over the medium to long term. Asked directly whether Sony plans to continue its live service ambitions, he confirmed it does, framing the genre as still relatively new and worth experimenting in.

That framing sits awkwardly next to the recent record. Concord launched and was pulled within two weeks. Destiny 2 — once a poster child for live service done right — is being wound down, and the bulk of Bungie's staff have lost their jobs. Sony's own CFO Lin Tao acknowledged last year that things weren't "going entirely smoothly," though her takeaway was that Sony simply needed to make better live service games rather than fewer of them. She even cited Destiny 2 as proof the model could still work — a read that has not aged well.

The gap between Sony's stated confidence and its actual results is hard to ignore. Eight cancelled titles, a studio gutted, and a flagship live service game shuttered — and the answer is to keep going. Whether Sony has genuinely learned from those failures or is just repeating the same bet with more conviction remains to be seen.