Despite Sony admitting to investors that its live service games strategy isn’t quite going to plan, it would appear that the higher-ups among the company’s games segment are still very much lashed to the model, as evidenced by an interview from The Financial Times with SIE studio business group CEO Herman Hulst.

“The number [of live-service releases] is not so important. What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities. I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.”

As part of this focus on ensuring cheap failure (which is quite the aspiration), Hulst talked up several process safeguards such as more rigorous testing of games in development including more group testing, a cross-pollination of ideas among Sony studios, and creating “closer relationships” with top executives. “The advantage of every failure…is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is,” Hulst argues.

All of this is, of course, said against the backdrop of some high profile live service title bellyflops, including the likes of Concord and news that Marathon would be delayed for an indeterminate length of time, along with the company not completing its plan to have 12 live service games online by March 2025; of those twelve, only Helldivers 2 made it over the finish line.