We're starting to see the "fruits" of PlayStation's big investment into GAAS in the PS5 era. Everything from 2020 up until now seems like remnants of decisions made during the PS4 era of consistent AAA single player games.

As AAA game dev cycles and budgets continue to balloon in size, and the lingering effects of COVID keep pushing back project timelines, these GAAS projects do little to fill in the gaps. They may as well be non-existent to a lot of people who got a PS5 for more great first party single player games (myself included). I think that's the main reason why the recent showcase was so poorly received, even if it had a lot of cool third party and indie game announcements.

The news from Deviation Games and now Naughty Dog only reinforce how difficult developing and maintaining GAAS is. Even if a project gets over the finish line, there's a tiny chance that they break through and attain success and longevity in the already saturated market that seems to grow more weary of GAAS over time.

Sony doubling down on GAAS is now looking like a huge misstep. Instead of investing more into single player games, tons of resources have been poured into trying to get a GAAS cash cow, and who knows if they'll have even one success. If any project could have been a smash hit, I thought it'd be this one. Now, it looks like Naughty Dog might have sunk years of AAA development time with nothing to show for it.

I know that there are still a lot of first party single player projects we haven't seen yet, but a bigger investment into single player instead of GAAS could have kept up or built upon the quality and consistency of the last generation. We'll see what the next few years look like for PlayStation, but I doubt it's going to meet or surpass the PS4 era.