Ghost of Yōtei Legends, the multiplayer co-op mode for Sucker Punch Productions’ Ghost of Yōtei, launched earlier this year on March 10 and received its first major content expansion, Raid mode, on April 10. However, the Raid update wasn’t just Ghost of Yōtei Legends’ first expansion; it was also its last, as Sucker Punch has now confirmed that no further “major” updates are planned for the co-op mode.
Sucker Punch’s Lead Designer Darren Bridges confirmed the news on May 15, in a post on the PlayStation Blog: “The Raid update was our last major planned update for Legends. It finishes the story of the Yōtei Six in that mode. We’ve loved to see players playing it, continue to play it and enjoy it. It’s been great.”
Ghost of Yōtei Legends players on the r/gotlegends subreddit are understandably disappointed, considering that the same multiplayer mode in Ghost of Tsushima received two separate major content updates, and updates for the standalone mode spanned from its release in October 2020 until August 2021.
The news also comes as a bit of a surprise, considering that, by Sony’s own metrics, Ghost of Yōtei numbers were particularly strong, with 3.3 million units sold within its first month of release. So, if lots of people bought the game, and Ghost of Tsushima’s Legends mode was popular enough to have received close to a year’s worth of support, why is Sucker Punch moving away from Ghost of Yōtei Legends so soon?
While Bridges seems to be implying that this is the mode’s natural conclusion, as the Raid mode update “finishes the story” of Ghost of Yōtei Legends, I find it hard to believe that Sony wouldn’t want Sucker Punch to continue pumping out new content if it wasn’t profitable. Perhaps, instead, this has more to do with Sony’s recent pivot away from live-service titles.
Marathon notwithstanding, Sony has been on a bit of a live-service shutdown spree in the past year. Even Sony’s CFO Lin Tao stated that the company’s live-service obsession was “not entirely going smoothly” last year, so maybe this has less to do with Ghost of Yōtei and more to do with some potential single-player-focused plans for Sucker Punch’s future.