Is Sony beginning to coast? With PS5 sales up and first-party releases down, gaming's eerie new normal takes shape

After last night’s State of Play, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re coming to the end of the PlayStation 5 generation. The big guns of Sony Santa Monica and Guerilla are silent, the teased-out reveals of Insomniac’s Wolverine, Bungie’s Marathon, or Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2: On the Beach remain exactly that, still merely teased. Naughty Dog’s next thing is lurking, off in the distance, gathering whatever secret power that studio ritually summons every near-decade to squeeze impossible reserves of lifeblood from end-of-generation hardware. And here comes a spate of middling remasters and kind-of-neat-looking third-party games to tide us over!

But instead – instead of the usual, late-gen chatter about such-and-such blockbuster surely being a PS6 launch game, or so-and-so remasters being a final, Switch-style scrape of the HD remake barrel; instead of the predictable tentpole rhythms – we are smack bang in the middle of the PS5’s prime. And given that, this all just feels very weird.

After a quiet-ish year in 2024, carried by the surprise hit of Helldivers 2 and the Concord-burying good will of Astro Bot, the hope was that 2025 – fuelled by Ghost of Yotei, Death Stranding 2 and the assumed untold, unannounced riches of Sony’s many other studios – would bang. There’s still plenty of room for surprise reveals or breakout hits – everyone’s continued inability to predict the next game of the moment is arguably this industry’s trademark; breakout hits its only real guarantee – so if not a bang, at least a gentle pop? Even then, we are short of a few blockbusters here, and Sony is nothing if not a peddler of blockbusters these days. And the timing is rather odd.

There’s a fairly obvious explanation for that oddness, mind. A lot of the games Sony’s had in the pipeline for the PS5 have, reportedly, been summarily cancelled in the past few months. Bend, the developer of Syphon Filter, Days Gone and meaty handheld exclusives like Uncharted: Golden Abyss, had the plug pulled on a new open-world game with multiplayer elements. At the same time, Bluepoint, the team behind a streak of excellent remasters including Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls, had a live-service God of War game cancelled. This is on top of cancelled co-op games from Insomniac and the now-shuttered London Studio, a cancelled multiplayer The Last of Us spin-off from Naughty Dog, and a cancelled live service Twisted Metal project from embattled Liverpudlian studio Firesprite. And, of course, Concord.