Sony has said it intends to increase its PC player base as it pushes into the live-service space.
In its new corporate strategy report, SIE sounded hopeful that its acquisition of original Halo developer and Destiny creator Bungie would help bolster its live-service operation. In addition, the company suggested that its push into live-service could expand the amount of people playing the ever-growing catalog of PlayStation games on PC.
As part of its strategy to boost active users across the board, Sony said "knowledge sharing from Bungie" will enhance the company's "ability to develop and operate live service games," partly with the "aim to increase the number of active users on PCs."
Although we've heard a fair bit about Sony's larger strategy around live-service, we've still yet to see the fruits of its labor. We've heard reports that The Last of Us multiplayer project will be free-to-play and "very, very live-servicey,", but that's still unconfirmed. Meanwhile, PlayStation London's yet-untitled fantasy online co-op game definitely sounds like a live-service game, but we still don't know much about it.
Then there's Haven Studios, which PlayStation has said it specifically picked up because it had "a lot of experience with live-service games." Again, we know something's in the oven but it's unclear exactly what, beyond the fact that it's in the increasingly broad live-service category.
Deviation Games, a studio set up by former Treyarch developers, announced that they were working on a PlayStation game in June 2021, but recently the company suffered some substantial layoffs (via VideoGamer), painting a grim picture for the future of the project.
Finally, we have Bungie, Sony's would-be Trump card in its race to live-service prominence. We've seen no signs of Destiny 2 slowing down any time soon with Season of the Deep set to go live next week, and the studio has yet to reveal its next project, but reports suggest it could be a revival of the Marathon in the vein of Escape from Tarkov.