Latest news with #HermanHulst
Gizmodo
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Sony is Still Putting Its Faith in ‘Marathon'
Bungie's Marathon is still coming out, and when it does, PlayStation plans on giving the extraction shooter a fair shot. During a recent investor interview, Sony Interactive Entertainment head Herman Hulst assured the game would come out before March 31, 2026, when Sony's fiscal year ends. Touching on its recent alpha test, he descbied the feedback as 'varied, but super useful. […] The constant testing, the constant re-validation of assumptions that we just talked about, to me is just so valuable to iterate and to constantly improve the title, so when launch comes, we're going to give the title the optimal chance of success.' Hanging over PlayStation is 2024's sci-fi shooter Concord, which shut down weeks after launch and later led to developer Firewalk Studios closing down. That's been just one of several botched attempts from PlayStation's attempts to enter live-service games, which includes several canceled projects and layoffs across its first-party studios. While acknowledging these 'unique challenges' and attributing Concord's failure to the 'hypercompetitive market' of hero shooters, Hulst talked up how they're avoiding the same mistakes with Marathon. 'It's going to be the first new Bungie title in over a decade, and it's our goal to release a very bold, very innovative, and deeply engaging title. We're monitoring the closed alpha cycle the team has just gone through. We're taking all the lessons learned, we're using the capabilities we've built and analytics and user testing to understand how audiences are engaging with the title.' One thing Hulst didn't touch on, though, was the recent accusations of art plagiarism levvied against Bungie. In May, artist Fern 'Antireal' Hook released evidence alleging the studio stole assets she made from previous work and failed to credit her. After investigating, Bungie attributed the theft to the work of a former employee, publicly apologized, and said it would do 'everything we can to make this right' with Hook. It also promised to review all in-game assets and replace 'questionably sourced' art with original, in-house work. With the mention of its arriving before the fiscal year ends, Marathon may be delayed out of its current September 23 launch. At time of writing, Bungie and PlayStation have kept mum on a potential delay, but the game failed to make an appearance at PlayStation's recent State of Play in early June. [via IGN]
Forbes
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
PlayStation Has Its Head In The Sand About Its Live Service Future
Marathon While fans wait for crumbs of new information about PlayStation games like Intergalactic or Wolverine, Sony is continuing to tout their current and future live service plans, saying that it is "very, very committed to building a diverse and a resilient live-service portfolio,' according to boss Herman Hulst. This is in the wake of promises that PlayStation has learned lessons from the failure of Concord: "We have reviewed our processes in light of this to deeply understand how and why that title failed to meet expectations and to ensure we're not going to make the same mistakes again,' Hulst said. Live Services But looking at Sony's plans in the plain light of day, and despite all this projected confidence, it very much feels like the company is burying its head in the sand when it comes to the reality of its situation. Of the games pictured on its live-service planning sheet, we can break most of them down in different ways: Helldivers 2 FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Helldivers 2 – An unequivocal success story, one of the only ones Sony has had during this recent push, but something of a limited-time offer. Developer Arrowhead is not a Sony studio, and it has announced that because Helldivers 2 has done so well, that they are able to self-fund and publish their next game without Sony's help at all. While they say it's no shade to Sony, it reinforces that Arrowhead is not some sort of in-house live-service powerhouse they can rely on indefinitely, and they will be moving on. Destiny 2 Frontiers Destiny 2 – The decade-spanning series is something of a miracle in the land of live services, and you can say it actually helped launch the entire trend. But in year 11, things are scaling way down in the post-Light and Darkness era. The game has gone from record highs to record lows as it moves toward a new 'Frontiers' era, which will allow the game to subsist, but it is simply never going to reach previously high water marks from here. Sony will also not allow Bungie to put D2 to bed in order to take time to make a Destiny 3 that may never even get here as D2 shambles on past its expiration date. Marathon Marathon – Herman Hulst made headlines calling the game 'bold and innovative' and slides touting 'strong engagement' about the game, but it's just sandblasting away the enormous issues facing Marathon, a quadruple combo blow of 1) a poor gameplay showcase, 2) mixed-to-poor alpha feedback, 3) a headline-dominating art plagiarism scandal, 4) a post-alpha, post-plagiarism livestream that did little to reassure anyone on any front. Marathon is in deep trouble, and it will take something of a miracle for this game to land the way Sony wants it to as an industry hit. Fairgame$ Fairgames – The head of the studio, Jade Raymond, just left the project. Reports of internal tests say the game is bad. We have not seen or heard anything from it in almost two years. This is either going to be cancelled ahead of release or explode on the launchpad. If any game had a Concord-like future ahead of it, if it did actually come out, it's Fairgames. Those are the listed games. The other major, non-cancelled projects we know about are an upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn multiplayer monster-hunter, where we've seen almost nothing from it, and it will involve the always-risky idea of trying to convert fans of a single player series into something that's a dedicated multiplayer offering. Sony carved out a chunk of Bungie to make a new, in-house studio working on the game codenamed Gummy Bears, which does not have a name or any sort of preview footage, and while internal tests have been positive, it's hardly the first time we've heard that before. Perhaps the most promising item is what we have the least amount of information about, that Jason Blundell has his own studio inside Sony now and may make something cool akin to his Black Ops Zombies experience. But again, zero information here. Sony may be putting on a brave face, but things are going poorly. Its next two live games are probably not even a coinflip of whether they fail or not, and if there are any ones that work past that, they're still years away with literally nothing public shown about any of them. It's not good. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Sony Touts ‘Strong' Marathon Engagement, Confirms Release Window
Marathon The future of Marathon after the last month or so feels rather unsteady, but in a new SIE presentation, Sony is reinforcing that it's an important game in its lineup, and it's projecting confidence. Sony's Herman Hulst took some time during his overview of PlayStation's offerings to single Marathon out as 'an innovative and bold take on the extraction shooter genre.' This was joined by a slide that under the banner 'FY25 Focus,' which said that there is 'Strong early engagement for Bungie's bold and innovative new title.' Marathon If you've been following the saga of Marathon, all this is a bit eyebrow-raising. For starters, at least the presentation reinforces a window for Marathon, Fiscal Year 2025, in a time when most players believe it will be delayed out of its current September 23, 2024 release date. FY25 ends in March 2026, so it would not be something huge like a year delay. Even six months is pushing it, so if there is one, it would not be all that long, and you would wonder what might be able to be changed or fixed in that time. That leads to the next aspect of this, this supposed 'strong engagement.' Sure, there's been strong engagement, but that consists of a lot of negativity about its gameplay reveal, then an overwhelming sense that the Closed Alpha was underwhelming, then an industry-wide scandal where it was revealed that plagiarized art had made it through the game's pipeline over a number of years and had ended up in the game itself. So yes, there was 'engagement.' FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Either Sony is completely divorced from the online conversation surrounding Marathon, or they see where things are headed and feel forced to project strength regardless. Saying nothing about Marathon or waffling on it here would do nothing to help them or the game so of course, yes, you say you believe in the game, even if you're dancing around what's actually happening by bragging about 'engagement.' But internally, even Bungie is extremely concerned about where things are, and where things are going from here. Live services The chart of Sony's live service prospects is bleak. There's no real getting around that. It considers its eternal baseball game, The Show, a live service. Destiny 2 has been bleeding players and is now entering a very risky new era that seems unlikely to return the game to its glory days. Marathon is on the edge of oblivion at this point. It's hilarious they're even saying Fairgames is still actually coming out. The unequivocal bright spot here is Helldivers 2, which has been true since it launched. But its developer, Arrowhead, will not be working with Sony for its next game. Over the course of the past two months, I have arrived at the conclusion that Marathon is just not going to work. The vibes are awful, the problems with the game are mostly etched in stone, and now we have an art theft scandal on top of that. I do expect a delay to be announced, but it won't be lengthy, and I do not believe this is going to be the release that both Sony and Bungie need, whatever they're saying in their slideshow. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
