Odd numbers he brought out. I mean the gaming industry combing mobile, pc and console is only estimated to be about $200bn this year. Does he think a subscription service would need to be 30% of that to be profitable?
I explained the math he was likely doing. It isn’t broken at all, just premised on dumb assumptions. It’s important to be able to understand those distinctions b/t ‘incorrect math’ and ‘bad assumptions’. He is thinking from the pov of having all games (500 or so of them) be $120mil budgets. THAT is what is broken, not his math.
By all means point out any mistake in my arithmetic (ya can’t since there aren’t any, but please take the time to go over what I laid out again if it suits you).
In which way? I explained the math in specifics already.
Or do you mean your figures…which are literally all made up from thin air except for the reference to Layden’s number at the end. Do you have a concrete source for your figures wrt projected Outriders sales guidance, its profit targets, or cost? Do you have a source for any figure you included in your post? Pretty sure ya don’t since ya made them up from thin air…
You can make stupid posts like this, or you can grasp basic math, but not both. The math he is most likely using is not broken or incorrect. It is just based on dumb assumptions that most likely stem from his pov being limited to what Sony was positioned to consider…ya know, like I literally explained to anyone who actually bothered reading the post I made.
If you start by assuming*:
- All game revenues come entirely from subs and never a dime from DLC/MTX’s/retail
- All games release exclusively on high end home consoles
- All games on the entire service (say 500 or so of them) on average cost $120mil to produce
…then Layden’s numbers make sense mathematically. $5 bil/mo spreads out to $10 mil for each of the 500 games in the service, which covers their $120 mil production cost in a year’s time.
*None of these are remotely sensible assumptions to make. Layden likely made them due to his limited pov from within Sony, who has strengths/weaknesses that would ‘obscure’ his thinking. His math is right, but his assumptions are all super out of touch with anything resembling Game Pass (for example).
The thing is that if he doesn’t know that revenues are also coming from retail/digital sales/DLC/MTX on Xbox and PC and that every game on Game Pass doesn’t have the budget of The Last Of Us 2 then that makes him look even more stupid even if his math is not busted…what are the chances that he didn’t know all the above? he can’t be that dumb to even start thinking that 500 games on a service like GP with 120m budgets is a realistic scenario? can he? 
He says you can’t produce +120M games with a 9.99 subscription service but Microsoft’s games don’t get money only from Game Pass, they still sell at retail, Steam, digital copies, expansion passes, DLCs, microtransactions, special editions, deluxe digital editions, collector’s editions, merchandise… All that gives a ton of extra revenue on top of the revenue from Game Pass.
He’s just so wrong in every single thing he says it’s hard to imagine him ever having had so high up a position in a successful games company.
It’s just pure and utter BS that doesn’t reflect the reality in any way.
Since “consolidating” Ms only increased their output and diversity, last year alone they released games for genres that Sony never even tried to do in their whole history.
And don’t even get me started on the insane argument against gamepass.
But that would also mean that they are swapping out all 500 games every year. Considering there only about 4000-5000 games made for a console during the 7 odd year generation that would mean that something like 70-80% of all games made to be played on Xbox would be on gamepass. The numbers are obviously exaggerated to make a point but it was still a fairly poor way of phrasing his missgivings on the subscription model
Doubling down huh. Okay.
I wonder how much this attitude reflects the views of the current execs at Sony. You get the impression that the company culture is 100% locked into the $70 mega-blockbuster model and they refuse to seriously consider that a different model could be successful.
Talking about diversity
This person should get a Gamepass sub and see for itself 
Yeah his presumptions make no sense. The fact his math works out makes his assumptions even dumber too, since it is clear he didn’t just make this up outta thin air and just blurt it out but rather that bean counters at Sony put at least some thought into this kinda direction and still somehow landed on those assumptions.
I’d love to see someone press him for his thoughts on Game Pass specifically since it gets around all the issues he assumes would arise for a successful sub service.
Yeah maybe I’m reading too much into that part, but my impression was he was focusing that consolidation accusation on Sony specifically. The other comments he made surrounding that part about how he wishes Sony still had stuff like PaRappa, etc and how the games can all start to look the same is exactly the criticism many of us would have wrt Sony’s portfolio, while MS buys a huge pub and the diversity and risk taking seems to be flourishing.
Yeah his thinking clearly was based on some really wild assumptions and one would imagine he might be more hesitant to repeat those claims in a world where Game Pass is the talk of the industry for the past 6 months. It’s not a good look for sure.
Wrt the cycling of the library, he likely was imagining it from the pov of having the entire library for the platform be in the sub service. I wonder how much he envies what Game Pass is doing since it not only is super popular and successful in the areas his assumptions would think impossible, but it also lets devs take more risk in design and be more ambitious and opens up the spotlight for indies. Basically it is the best of all worlds there.
I’m fine with him and other industry executives dismissing and disregarding GamePass subscription service. That merely means when GamePass really takes off, it will be even longer before anyone can dream of catching up to it.
It really gives the impression that Sony is WAY behind MS in this area. Almost akin to how far behind the competition Nintendo is wrt online stuff.
Yep, let them be, everything is fine.
Until it isn’t and Xbox becomes the default ecosystem for games and no one know what happened.
The real irony is that Sony was the first platform holder with a streaming and download subscription service.
They just treat it like it’s an afterthought and a backwater for old games only, and have trained their users to think the same.
There are two things that are important:
- MS can experiment and are willing to do so because they have the resources to do so. For them, Cloud gaming makes perfect sense because they have an impressive network for that. Subscriptions services are the future, as you can see more and more players get into the arena. MS has, IMO, many advantages that the rest do not have, such as first-party studios and a very solid cash flow.
- One of Sony’s highest contributors to their revenue is Playstation, and I feel they are going to milk the more traditional way of thinking about games (Sell X amount of units for X dollars) because they can and its working for them. How much time they have to do this, is the important question, because if more and more players enter the streaming gaming wars, it might not matter how big PS is right now, if they enter late, they will have a very hard battle to win. At one point, the user’s mind set might change, and they could be like: “uhh, 80 $ for a game? naaa”
I feel like Shawn probably meant 50m subscribers, and was just kinda talking off the cuff when he started comparing it to the 250m console market.
Yes, i based my outriders figures based the on numbers of developers @ pcf, an average wage of $70k and development time. I never said they were factual. So no I did not make them up from thin air.
Layden is incorrect saying a sub service needs 500mill subs to recoup a 120 million investment. And you pull this 500 games @ $120 mill per year out your ass, layden never said anything of the sort, he was talking about one game and if he wasn’t he needs to learn to talk correctly because the words he says here dont mean that.
And making 500 games @ $120 million/ year is not only impossible because theres not enough devs in the world to do that but its also a dumb business move because that level of investment or content is not needed.
So his math dont make sense, gamepass can already support AAA games with its $3 billion yearly revenue and you saying “maybe he meant 500 AAA games a year” makes no difference because Layden never said that, and even if he did while his arithmetic may no longer be in question his business strategy and state of reality would be (there is not enough devs for 500 AAA/year and a company would need 1500 devs to make this possible)
So enough with the 
show.