As stated in the post on Forecast Analysis, Live Services/Games as a Service is an extremely lucrative business model that SIE is behind on adoption. If SIE does not increase the percentage of the games its studios develop that utilize the Live Service model, it could stand to lose billions of dollars in revenue, leading to a host of other catastrophic after-effects such as closure of studios, mass layoffs, cutting of R&D projects, and ultimately, severely crippling parent company Sony and its other business branches. The Risk Diagram below outlines potential risk outcomes factoring in how long SIE takes to launch a brand new, console-exclusive Live Service title and the overall amount of active Live Service games on the market.

The nature of Live Service games is that they are designed to maximize user engagement by periodically introducing new free and paid content over the life of the game service. Users, in addition to having to play the game regularly to keep up with their peers and teammates, must keep up with the game and its changes over its life in order to maintain a competitive edge. This is daunting enough to do in one game. With a user playing multiple Live Service games, the endeavor becomes nigh impossible and can negatively impact other areas of the user’s life. The struggle in doing this, as well as the struggle of the development studio in properly maintaining the service, is explained by Alyssa Mercante of Games Radar: “As a live service player, I’m finding it nearly impossible to keep up with multiple games’ battle passes, gun metas, and updates. On the development end, balance and consistency is often a pipe dream; to pluck just two examples out of the ether, Warzone recently buckled under the weight of another game integration, while Halo Infinite is struggling to stick to a single roadmap” (Mercante, 2022).

This is known as Live Service game fatigue. To avoid this fatigue, most players only play one Live Service game and continue to play that game for years, until the service goes offline. To put into perspective, SIE is already fighting an uphill battle. There are many Live Service games on the market that each have a sizable and dedicated user base who are highly resistant to switching to another game. The longer SIE takes to release a new Live Service game of their own, the number of new Live Service games in the market will increase, as most of the industry wants a piece of the pie. The market will shift accordingly, leaving an even smaller pool of potential users for SIE to entice to play their game once it releases. This outcome is mitigated if SIE releases their game sooner. However, it is a tight balancing act for SIE because modern game development is a long process, with AAA (highest budget games with budgets similar to or higher than top Hollywood films) games averaging a development time of 5 years. To note, SIE has begun to take steps in the right direction by recently acquiring game development studio Bungie (SIE, n.d.). This studio has years of experience running and maintaining highly successful Live Service games (Destiny and Destiny 2). It is likely that SIE will leverage their expertise in guiding their studios on Live Service game development.