In February 2022, Sony told investors it would ship 10 live-service games on PS5 and PS4 by March 2026. As that deadline has come and gone, the actual body count isn’t new titles — it’s cancelled projects, closed studios, and a nine-figure write-down, with the latest casualty landing just last week.

Horizon Hunters Gathering gets stripped down

Bloomberg reported on August 19, 2026, that Sony is reworking Horizon Hunters Gathering after poor feedback in private testing. The plan now is to cut the live-service elements entirely and turn it into a smaller-scope cooperative game built around a traditional story mode — a significant scope reduction for a project that was positioned as one of PlayStation’s next live-service bets.

Concord: the $400 million cautionary tale

The strategy’s most visible failure remains Concord, Firewalk Studios’ hero shooter, which Sony pulled offline on September 6, 2024 — just two weeks after launch — and refunded every copy sold. Reported development costs run as high as $400 million, though some of that figure may include what Sony paid to acquire Firewalk in the first place. Sony shut the studio down entirely that October.

Bungie: a $765 million write-down

The damage isn’t limited to games that never found players. On June 25, 2026, Bungie cut 292 staff, gutting both its Destiny 2 and Marathon teams, after Sony recorded a $765 million impairment on the studio over the past financial year. Destiny 2’s final content update, Monument of Triumph, shipped June 9 with no further seasons planned, and studio head Justin Truman stepped down as the entire cinematics department was eliminated. Marathon, Bungie’s live-service extraction shooter, had launched to a muted reception earlier in the year — Sony’s own framing called it a “one-two punch” alongside Destiny 2’s decline.

Bluepoint Games: closed after its live-service pivot failed

Bluepoint Games — the studio behind acclaimed remasters like Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus — was closed in February 2026, putting roughly 70 people out of work. The closure followed the cancellation of a live-service God of War spinoff Bluepoint had been building since pivoting away from remaster work at Sony’s direction. A studio with a strong remake track record was retooled for live-service, that project got killed, and then so did the studio.

The one live-service bet that worked

Set against all of this, Helldivers 2 stands out as the strategy’s rare success: more than 12 million copies sold and the No. 3 best-selling game in the US in 2024, according to Circana. It’s also arguably the exception that proves the rule — developer Arrowhead is an independent studio Sony merely published, not a first-party team retooled around a live-service mandate. The PlayStation games that succeeded as live-service products largely weren’t the ones built top-down to be live-service products.

What’s left of the plan

Of the roughly 10-to-12 titles Sony announced in 2022, only a couple — Helldivers 2 and MLB The Show’s annual live content — have shipped and held an audience. The rest have been cancelled, descoped, or shut down alongside the studios that made them. Horizon Hunters Gathering’s rework suggests Sony has learned something from the pattern: rather than let another project reach Concord’s fate, it’s cutting the live-service ambitions before launch this time. Whether that’s enough to avoid another write-down is the open question heading into 2027.

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This is the same concentration-and-cutbacks pattern playing out across the wider industry — see record profits alongside record layoffs for the bigger picture. And for how PlayStation’s hardware side is faring by comparison, read about Switch 2 outselling the PS5 in recent quarters.