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Game Industry Biz: Sony's gaming business is struggling, and its purpose is now unclear
ChorizoPicozo
Member
videogames are not new. it's already an established and mature market.
sony has won the console market
nitnedo the handled market
steam the PC market
apple/Google mobile
and it's about store fronts. the 30% cut.
your idea is for PS to follow xbox.... which has been a complete business failure.
GametimeUK
Member
The amount of people here in denial about Sony being doomed is just comical.
Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
ChorizoPicozo
Member
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
again:
i don't understand what are you trying to argue
I'm going to give up here.
Zacfoldor
Member
I mean, they’ll be playing Astrobot this weekend. It could be great. Sony shut down Concord. We are back. I don’t get what to cope. Unless the pipeline is monumentally fucked what will go wrong?
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Oh okay then...
...waste of server space on GI.biz's part to host the article tho :/
iPods & iPhones were still products that Apple 100% made and retained 100% vertical integration of in terms of ecosystem control.
SIE's branching into PC is not the same thing! Their entire PC initiative is them as a dependent unto Valve and the Steam storefront, and to a different extent, Microsoft and the Windows operating system. They cannot maximize vertical integration & ecosystem control through their PC strategy as-is.
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kazuyamishima
Member
Playstation, Doomed since 1994.
Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
I mentioned this in another thread.
You're conflating Sony putting games on Steam today with their future PC strategy.
They are not one and the same.
Sony needs as much operating income and cash flow as it can get, it's not a premier company like Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.
Sony needs the immediate revenue from PC ports in order to keep their margins growing in the short term.
Long term, they're almost certainly planning a PC Launcher/Storefront. Being dependent on Windows is not a big deal, and it's kind of silly for you to even bring it up.
Clues that Sony is preparing a PC Launcher/Storefront
- PS Peripherals App
- PSVR2 PC Adapter
- Increase Dual Sense support for PC
- PSN Overlay
- PSN requirements on Steam
- PlayStation's Inzone PC Monitors
- PS Link
- The creation of the Platform Business Group
- They stood up an entire PC Strategy and Planning department
Banjo64
cumsessed
They do though.
DenchDeckard
Moderated wildly
I'm taking this whole article as bullshit until Sonys next showcase or public communication. Whatever you want to call it.
If there isn't at least a couple of typical sony high profile single player bangers from studios outside of insomniac then something majorly fucked up is going down.
If there isn't at least a couple of typical sony high profile single player bangers from studios outside of insomniac then something majorly fucked up is going down.
Cakeboxer
Member
The business plan they had for decades can't last forever. Games are getting super expensive, many players prefering mobile gaming, Microsoft is no more competition, Nintendo is doing their own thing, the console market won't grow.
There is no more need for fully exclusive 400 million dollar games, they are only a big risc. Sony will be going full pc at some point, pretty sure PS6 games will all be pc day1.
Their Gaas approach is also a risc, but they have to keep up with the times. I don't see any struggling, i just see someone desperate for clicks.
There is no more need for fully exclusive 400 million dollar games, they are only a big risc. Sony will be going full pc at some point, pretty sure PS6 games will all be pc day1.
Their Gaas approach is also a risc, but they have to keep up with the times. I don't see any struggling, i just see someone desperate for clicks.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
You really think all of Sony's chips were on Concord?
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
But what if trying to "keep up with the time" bankrupts the Playstation division?
Cakeboxer
Member
They don't go all in on Gaas and they have one of the biggest and most loyal fanbases that forgives almost anything. They "just" need that one big thing that has 10% of the success of Fortnite or COD. Helldivers 2 was a good start, but you need PvP components for long term success.
ShadyAcshuns
Member
This GaaS misstep is turning into a plunge in an open manhole where raw sewage awaits.
Fess
Member
I think so too. But it’ll be a Mount Everest to climb just like it is for other launchers. Without day 1 releases it’ll fail and with day 1 releases it’ll still struggle. Look how things are going for Epic and Ubisoft.
Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
Again, I think you're missing the value.
It's like saying someone shouldn't try to be a pro basketball player because you're not going to be Lebron James. Even the worst pro players are still millionaires.
EGS would have been a success with just Fortnite not losing 20+ percent to Valve.
If Sony can establish successful games where they don't need to sell their games on Steam and can still sell them, they've already won.
The calculus is whether the cost of running said launcher and any decreased sales outweighs the that 20%. For most companies, that isn't the case.
But Sony isn't Epic or Ubisoft. They release far more hit titles and have the PS5 store to leverage, so they can more easily get 3rd party titles, which are pure profit.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Okay, so answer me this: how is SIE going to monetize their PC launcher/storefront in a way where they can still generate revenue from people who only buy games off of it? Because a customer who buys 3-4 games a year from the PC storefront is still much less valuable than the customer who buys 3-4 games a year on a PS5 or PS6; the latter still contributes more revenue by a country mile to SIE.
And just how many such customers do they expect to reach on PC in a market as entrenched as gaming storefronts, where Valve dominates with Steam? Or do you suppose SIE is just going to rely on 1P sales revenue on the PC storefront? Which might actually cripple some capacity of hardware sales & associated revenue more severely than them pushing for a big storefront/launcher with tons of 3P support?
Mind you, I have talked about this in the past. And, I have suggested ways it could be monetized i.e through PS+ subs including an ad-supported "free" PS+ tier auto-generated with a PSN account on the PC launcher/storefront. But you're still talking about a space where things like peripheral sales are going to take a dip, because PC users are going to expect to use all kinds of 3P controllers and not be locked to Sony's. Same goes for other peripheral types; headsets for example, yes you can use non-Sony ones on PS consoles, but the PS being a physical hardware device creates an impression of brand association with console players where some end up getting Sony-branded headphones and peripherals to match the console branding. SIE have none of those benefits with a PC launcher/storefront, so that's a drop in revenue and profits on that front.
Everyone I've seen hardcore pushing for a PS launcher/storefront on PC has yet to answer these questions satisfyingly, and I wouldn't be surprised if even SIE couldn't answer them in an absolute way just yet, if for a long time. There's a delicate balancing act they'd have to accomplish and anything short of, say, just making PlayStation consoles Windows PCs (or Linux PCs running WINE, which either way would involve its own set of very complex challenges to sort out) is going to require a ton of fine parts to be tuned just right.
Meaning there's a lot of areas where things could go terribly wrong, and then the ecosystem balance is shattered.
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Fess
Member
It’s not like Sony’s games are breaking sales records on Steam, how do you think they’ll do on their own launcher?
I definitely want them to try, because I want day 1 games on PC and I think that’s the only way it’ll happen for single player games. But I don’t think they’ll do any better than anyone else.
HogIsland
Member
Playstation needs to do day and date on Steam for the sake of continuing to grow Playstation Studios projects. A Playstation launcher will doom their efforts to expand into PC (simultaneously expanding into China), and seriously hurt funding for the next-next Naughty Dog, Santa Monica, Suckerpunch projects most of us want to see.
People at Sony are looking at Wukong and kicking themselves for not having Stellar Blade day and date on Steam.
reinking
Gold Member
No.
HogIsland
Member
Hiroki Totoki said as much
reinking
Gold Member
If you are talking about select service titles. Yes. If you are talking about all Sony games. He did not.
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
Nope. This year is total slop and many years are slop with nothing to play
Banjo64
cumsessed
Many years like?
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
Pretty much everything outside of 2017 and 2023 was pretty mid at best
Banjo64
cumsessed
Sony’s first party script writers have turned your brain to mush son.
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
Yeah I’d take that over the rehashed 20 year old titles that have zero initiative taken to modernize meaningfully which is what you can expect most years
Banjo64
cumsessed
HogIsland
Member
Not talking about the OP statement, talking about this one from february. He's not limiting it to live service games at all. He proposes growing the whole first party output through overall growth on PC. He also downplays the paramount importance of the selling consoles as a priority "in the past":
Sony seeking growth by bringing more first-party games to other platforms
PlayStation is looking at bringing more of its exclusive first-party titles to other platforms, such as PC, in an effor…
www.gamesindustry.biz
Sony is in the platform business. Making games is secondary. First party game sales account for a tiny sliver of their yearly revenue (but is a huge expenditure for them). Selling games on competitor platforms will not grow the platform business it will only destroy just like it did Xbox. To increase platform numbers they need to make their platform more attractive than the competition. That requires getting a lot of things right but one of those things is a commitment to 100% exclusives with very few exceptions.
reinking
Gold Member
Day and date where?Not talking about the OP statement, talking about this one from february. He's not limiting it to live service games at all. He proposes growing the whole first party output through overall growth on PC. He also downplays the paramount importance of the selling consoles as a priority "in the past":
Sony seeking growth by bringing more first-party games to other platforms
PlayStation is looking at bringing more of its exclusive first-party titles to other platforms, such as PC, in an effor…
HogIsland
Member
I'm saying this part because it's patently obvious day and date is worth multiples more sales. The goal isn't to popularize the console, the point is to get big margins on first party software. They spend almost the whole development budget again on marketing. It's wasting 10s of millions doing launch marketing to less than half the addressable market (PS5 owners).
Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
Again, the calculus is whether or not expanding the existing storefront and running and operating a launcher on PC has more cost than the cut of money they'd lose from decreased quantity of PC game sales AND the 20% cut they're giving to Valve.
But I think you're making other assumptions, such as everyone on console has PS+ when they don't or that no one on PC would have PS+ because they don't pay for online on PC, yet not everyone with PS+ plays online games.
It's true that people would certainly be more likely to buy PS+ on console, but the calculus isn't whether console is better for Sony than PC, it's whether it broadens their base. All that being said, the upfront cost for Sony is smaller with less barrier of entry here. Sony doesn't take a loss on hardware if the consumer provides their own hardware.
Again, the measure of success here isn't whether they can dislodge Valve as market leader. The calculus is whether they can increase their annual revenue and their operating income. I do think they'd rely mostly on 1P sales on the PC storefront, but I think it would be silly to think they wouldn't leverage their existing deals they make against Xbox into getting exclusives on PC.
Do people mostly buy cheap 3rd party controllers on console? No. They mainly buy Dual Sense controllers. Sony can making peripheral money by putting out the best quality products. It's why they bought Audeze. Historically Sony had been a small player in the peripheral market, and that has changed drastically in the last 2-3 years.
They can absolutely make more money with PS+ on PC and they could even bundled PS+ with Crunchyroll to entice even more people to use PS+.
You're assuming they lose console players to PC, yet there is no evidence console players want to be PC players. Sony is enforcing PSN logins on PC precisely so they can manage and gather data metrics on whether they're bleeding existing users or gaining new users.
You think answers aren't satisfying because they're not in line with your assumptions. Again, the exact way I told you exactly how sony was going to establish a PC VR adapter but you went on and on across multiple forums getting people to think they were going to do some crazy streaming solution.
Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
Sony has to weigh long term investment against short term, but one area where you're wrong is that Sony is pretty consistently one of the top publishers on Steam. I think what you fail to realize is that most publishers aren't breaking sales records on Steam.
What is Capcom's highest selling game currently on Steam? Before looking I bet you that Sony has at least 2 games that are higher.
Update: So I checked it looks like 3 and almost 4 unless I missed a game.
What people need to try and understand is that Sony doesn't need 51% of the PC market to make a storefront worth it, hell they don't need 20%.
All they need to do is make more money than they're losing on Steam's cut of games. Something has been been proved worth it for Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox... all massive games that aren't on steam.
Fess
Member
Using Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite as examples to show why a Sony launcher would work is pushing it too far. Let’s keep things realistic. Their current Steam games sell a couple millions, 2-5 maybe. I’m thinking they would sell maybe half in a Sony launcher. That’s just how things are, people like Steam.
But if they went with day 1 releases there it would change things, hard to say how much but being there when the hype is the highest would give them a healthy boost.
However, they would do even better day 1 on Steam, as seen with Helldivers 2. But then they lose the exclusivity power just like Microsoft. And console numbers would go down as well since enthusiasts can have both consoles and PC and would likely go with the PC release. No point thinking too much about, they have the numbers, if it happens then some numbers show that it makes sense.
Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
You're conflating things here. You're referring to Sony's single player games, games that are genuinely not as popular on PC in the first place. What Sony ultimately won't want to do is share their GaaS revenue with Valve. Helldivers 2 was super successful and Valve took a big piece of that pie.
This is what I mean by short term vs long term investment.
Sony's single player games might sell half of what they would sell on Steam, but building out that ecosystem will make it more easy for them to have success with large scale GaaS games like the ones I mentioned without having to cut Valve in.
This is why Sony is already going Day 1 with GaaS games, which again you're conflating with SP titles.
I'm not saying those aren't good things but investors don't look at things so superficially. It's as much how much money are we making tomorrow as it is track record, and realistically much more about the prior tbh.
Woopah
Member
2019 and 2022 weren't mid at best. H1 2024 has been poor though.
MayauMiao
Member
Don't forget Concord being the fastest first party game to get shut down in PlayStation history.
nowhat
Member
Investors are a bunch of lemmings that will follow one off a cliff*). As far as the corporate ones go, they have only a cursory understanding of any given business, and if $COMPANY_X doesn't meet $ABSURD_GROWTH_REQUIREMENT_Y, it means stocks of $COMPANY_Z_THATS_COMPLETELY_UNRELATED_BUT_THE_SAME_FIELD will fall as well, even though it has nothing to do with anything. Factor in algorithmic trading, and you have the shitshow that's the current stock market.
*) Yeah, in reality, lemmings don't actually follow one off a cliff. It was a "nature documentary" by Disney of all companies, I guess they wanted some drama. So they ended up drowning a bunch of lemmings. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-wilderness-lemming-suicide/
Is Playstation a Japanese or an American platform? Now we're going back to Segas problems, SEGA left the console industry cause Playstation is the big elephant in the room, if it's Sony's turn it has to be something bigger, otherwise, they themselves don't know what they're talking about.
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