Image credit: Eurogamer

Last night's PlayStation State of Play was a big one for Sony. We're still reeling from the platform holder's announcement in March that the PS5, PS5 Pro, and Portal would be getting major price hikes thanks to "continued pressures in the global economic landscape". And there's the most recent PS Plus price hike too. What's more, there have been recent reports that Sony plans to ditch PC versions of its single-player PS5 games, and all the while the company has apparently been selling fewer and fewer of its first-party titles.

Something has to give, and I think last night, we may have seen the beginning of a new chapter for PlayStation. Isn't it noticeable that - following Sony's disastrous pivot to live-service titles under former boss Jim Ryan, which the company has spent the last few years unpicking - the only multiplayer-focused games we saw in a 90-minute showcase were the actually pretty intriguing Kemuri (a co-op action game), Marvel Tokon (a fighting game), and a token trailer for Season 2 of Marathon? Even the Dune: Awakening PS5 announcement went to excruciating lengths to tell us there's a nice, meaty single-player mode in there and it's not all PvP griefing.

Woll to you, o'er earth and sea.Watch on YouTube

Long gone, then, are the days of PlayStation's resolute insistence that all we want are live-service, multiplayer games. For years, we'd be subject to trailers for doomed ventures like Destruction All-Stars, Concord, or Deathverse: Let it Die during these showcases - and that's just Sony's first-party offerings. Remedy's FBC: Firebreak and Amazon Game's King of Meat took up a fair amount of space in past showcases, and neither of them lasted a year. Sony seems to have read the room, and learned from its very expensive mistakes; there just is not enough audience for this many 'forever games' at once. You simply cannot cram more food onto plates already filled with Fortnite, Helldivers 2, GTA Online, Roblox, Minecraft, and all those other perpetual time-sinks and money-spinners that show no sign of giving up their share of the market.

But this pivot from the live-service singularity was not always the plan, it seems. Numerous other live service games have been cancelled by Sony over the past few years, many before we ever got to see what they might have been. London Studio's co-op game was cancelled and the studio shuttered in 2024. In 2023, Naughty Dog cancelled a standalone multiplayer game set in the world of The Last of Us. A live service Twisted Metal project at Firespite was also cancelled in 2024. Footage of a cancelled co-operative live service Spider-Man game from developer Insomniac - titled Spider-Man: The Great Web - also appeared online a few years ago alongside rumours of its untimely death before the public ever got to see it. It seems Sony is so allergic to live-service, multiplayer-first titles right now, it didn't even want to remind us about Horizon: Hunters Gathering.

Instead, last night we were treated to a plethora of premium single-player experiences - all kicking off with Logan in his hairy, five-foot-three glory, manifesting in a whirlwind of viscera and adamantium. Animated and agitated with whatever technical wizardry Insomniac has been cooking up in its proprietary, in-house game engine, Wolverine looks like the exact sort of thing people have been pining for lately: a lush, no-holds barred romp through a brutal and over-the-top comic book world. It has very strong 'Xbox 360' vibes, and I mean that in a complimentary way. This is the sort of single-player game that the generation was teeming with (or perhaps lousy with, depending on your outlook).

Then there's God of War Laufey. A colourful, zany breath of fresh air within the self-serious confines of PlayStation's first-party stable. Yes, it's got some of that telltale Whedon-esque 'Millenial writing' that seems to be popping up in games a lot these days, and I'm sure the worst parts of the internet are going to resent playing as a woman, but I think it looks great… and somehow seems to fuse old and new God of War into one slightly unbelievable package? And putting Deborah Ann Woll as the eponymous Laufey, front-and-centre? Superb choice. She'll carry that role, effortlessly.

Then we've got Until Dawn 2, a real unexpected treat that asks "what if we set a horror game on Love Island"? And even outside of Sony's first-party offerings, you've got an excellent-looking Dave the Diver prequel in Bancho the Chef, there's Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis (even if it is riddled with genAI), not-Jurassic Park survival game The Lost Wild, Phantom Blade Zero, Onimusha, Silent Hill: Townfall, Ace Combat 8, Stuntman, and Control Resonant. Last night was a real feast for single-player games, and - I think - shows Sony's commitment to an audience that has been vocally anti-'live service slop' for at least a year now.

But is it enough? Is a show like this enough to reverse the bleeding and install more people into the ecosystem? Can Sony, with a machine that costs more now than it did at launch, encourage people to play on PlayStation as games, tech, and the services attached to them get more and more expensive? I'm not convinced, but investment in big, spectacular single-player feats of development like Laufey and Until Dawn 2 and Wolverine give me hope; they are, after all, what Sony has historically been the best at. Or perhaps it's GTA 6 not coming to PC for a while that is literally going to save console gaming. In the short term, at least.