They will pivot to highly premium brand with sky high profit margins even if fthey won’t be able to produce as many games as Microsoft. The main difficulty is to make people stop buying Playstation consoles or services. Even if Microsoft offers Game Pass, cheaper console and games, even in USA Xbox does not steamroll Playstation.
If the games planned for release in 2023 for Xbox will be released in 2023, 2023 will kinda allow us to decide if Xbox will be able to fight back against Playstation.
I think Sony will be fine in the long run but unlikely to be the market leader. They have a stronger global brand than Xbox right now but don’t have the money or infrastructure to compete against Xbox. Even if they bought someone like Square Enix which seems increasingly unlikely, that doesnt really help them grow.
Xbox has basically 3x the number of games in development when compared to Sony and thats not including Activision-Blizzard which pushes it to close to 4x. And all the games will be cheap/on multiple devices.
3x sounds far too high - is this just based on a sample of known games?
Sony now has about ~20-22 internal game pipelines (it’s fuzzy because of some studios being multi-team), not counting mobile or aniplex publishing (which releases games most years, some of which are on ps4/switch). Any games from external partners is surplus to this.
Strategically, Sony has also historically pursued numerically more and longer exclusive agreements, which definitely helps pad out their release calendar.
The difference in total # of exclusives releasing annually I don’t expect Microsoft to have a significant advantage in, even a few years from now. They might have something as much as 1.2-1.5x more, but Sony will still have plenty, and numbers alone only tell half the story.
The general quality of Gamepass (and particularly the strength of ABK + Bethesda titles there day 1) is going to be the most powerful advantage Microsoft will have.
Didn’t Sony explicitly announce how many games they had in development like a year or so ago? I think it was low-mid 20s with some number (like 10-12) new IP and also like 10-12 being GaaS.
Xbox is aiming for one first party title per quarter minimum and this was before the ABK acquisition. If 4 is the minimum we can expect some years with 6, 7, or 8 titles. Sony currently has 22 studios. I counted 17 that are actually making games, the other 5 are support studios. Out of the 17 studios that are actually leading projects, we have London Studio who hasnt made a significant first party game for Sony since SingStar in the late 2000’s, Media Molecule who seems to be making Dreams indefinitely, Sony San Diego who makes MLB the Show and releases games straight into Game Pass, Recently acquired Savage Game Studios who has a head count of a dozen people and makes mobile games,. So out of 17 who are leading projects, there are 13 who are considered the “core” sony studios working on regular releases in the single player or GAAS space.
Sony announced they are making 25 games including mobile and live service. The count for Xbox atm is 76 and growing, including ports of previous PS exclusives.
Post ABK Microsoft will have 33 studios. They have 23 studios now, 3 of those include Mojang who are multiplat, Alphadog and Roundhouse who arent making anything right now and are supporting Bethesda.
So if you want to use my logic, its 13 studios vs 20 for MS who are busy making regular first party/non multiplat games. And that is BEFORE ABK, which increases the studio count significantly. The current project count for MS can be found below.
I think the reduction to 13 is too drastic of an assumption. I don’t have time to do a comprehensive estimate, 20-22 internal 1st party games in parallel was a ballpark, but for example Media Molecule has been hiring for a new title so they are not just working on Dreams, and San Diego Studio has hired for an action adventure game (which presumably would therefore not be a multiplat baseball game). Firesprite is working on both VR and non-VR games.
People following Playstation closely have previously estimated as high as 28 or 29 games concurrently but that’s involving a lot of tea-leaf reading, inference, and imo a significant dose of wishful thinking on their part. I think my estimate is closer to a grounded read of the situation. This includes things like Insomniac working on both Spider Man and Wolverine simultaneously for instance.
I haven’t thoroughly checked it all, but the 76 games figure seems very inflated to me. At a casual glance, I believe I can explain at least some of it that isn’t like… untrue, but makes it a misleading comparison if you’re directly stacking it up against the figure I’m giving here for Sony. Gears 6 + Alpha Point game is a good illustrative example, because technically it’s true they’re both in “development”, but we know that they are not entering deep stages of production on Gears until the other game is done to free up most of the team. So it’s not really a multi team studio like Obsidian or Insomniac is where you could assume (for scheduling purposes) that they’re both going to come out within a year or two of each other because they’re both in full swing at the same time. One is in preproduction / iteration stages while the other is in full production. Other titles in the list like “The Gears Collection” is speculative and presumably involves partner studios, so not necessarily false in it’s own context but it’s not an apples:apples thing. And there is a lot of speculative there - Obsidian is listed as working on the following:
When really, the studio is only working on 4 of these things meaningfully and 2 of those are 10 person micro-projects. This may end up being “the approximate list of all games they’ll release this generation / early next gen” but we can’t just take that number (7) and divide by 4 years on average for a game and assume that Obsidian will be cranking out 2 games per year most years.
Since the discussion is about generalized throughput, I think that’s a fair metric to be discussing. There is unfortunately a lot of ambiguity in what the “true” numbers we should be using for that purpose is. But I think your original figure of “3x in dev” is quite far off the mark.
Counting down from that list, I’d estimate the true number of new Microsoft games that are in serious parallel development (disregarding DLC, service updates, multiplatform releases, and ABK) is about 27 or 28. This would be against Sony’s comparable number of about 20.
I will here also take a moment to acknowledge that Microsoft currently has more active service titles, so that provides some attraction on top of just the raw number of games. But this is what I’d expect is the number you could then take as a basis to estimate annual releases - which would give us about 4 average releases from Sony per year (at 5 years per game), versus 5.6 average releases from Microsoft per year (also assuming 5 years per game). Both could go more or less if they take more or less time per game to release on average, but it’s a post-covid world so I’m being pessimistic. This is a ratio of about 1.4 : 1 favoring Microsoft - pre ABK. A second note is that since some of these teams are new, this isn’t what we can expect right now (and that’s true for Microsoft too, who has not been doing 5-6 games per year consistently, it’s taking a while to get into full gear).
I am confused how Sony is going to average only one less game per year when Sony will have 40% less studios and many less games in development.
Closer to 2 than 1. A 40% increase (5.6 / 4 = 1.4x).
This is a similar ratio to the raw figures for how many studios each one has (discounting multiplat, mobile and support-only teams). Sony has 17 such studios (or 16 if you assume that San Diego is only hiring to support some other team rather than for it’s own Action Adventure game). This gives 20 projects because several teams are confirmed or heavily implied to be working on multiple things.
XGS+Bethesda has 23 studios, which shrinks a little bit after you take out Mojang / Alpha Dog, and gives rise to about 28ish projects due to multi-team studios.
If we discount VR games the ratio might rise from 1.4:1 to more like 1.6:1, but it’s speculative as to how many projects are VR and how many are conventional.
Post ABK, Microsoft’s team count skyrockets but a lot of that is tied up in support for multiplatform service games, and situations where you have 6 teams making 3 games thanks to CoD requiring so much support. And obviously we don’t want to start another CoD argument about whether that’s multiplat beyond 2025 lol.
This is all to get back to what I really am saying - the total # of exclusive games per year I’m not expecting to be drastically higher. But I do expect that the true advantage Microsoft will have is just an unbeatable value in their 1st party content on Gamepass. It would be exorbitantly expensive for Sony to get close to matching the impact of CoD on GP. But in the conventional arena, I think they’re still quite competitive in a mid term future, and they can make up exclusive game shortfalls largely with 3rd party dealmaking because the gap isn’t insurmountable. Microsoft could choose to also do more of that - but presently have not been (hard to know what their future strategy will be).
Not stonks
If Sony had to go all in on a company, I believe EA would be worth it just for the gaas expertise and It’ll be just in time for the BioWare comeback we’ve all been waiting for.
It’s not gonna happen. EA currently worths 36 billion, Sony doesn’t have that amount of cash for this level of acquisition.
Considering Sony are massively in debt and are only worth 103B themselves (which includes TV hardware, movies, music etc) I personally can’t see them raising the 45-50B it would cost to buy EA just for the PlayStation division, it would be like Microsoft spending a trillion on an Xbox only acquisition.
I maintain my stance that we won’t see Sony’s acquisitions higher than 5b at best.
I can see Sony going for sega tbh. Even though I think Microsoft will go for them, Sony might as well.
If they did there’s no way Sony would be able to outbid Microsoft (it’s clear there’s interest there from Microsoft). The only advantage is Sony are also a Japanese company.
Sony isn’t betting the farm on any publisher imo. Way too risky when they can make other smart investments.
Imo Sony should just buy fromsoftware. I especially don’t like them but many do and it is in their budget
If Kadokawa wasn’t selling them before they certainly are not going to now. Makes more sense for Kadokawa to keep holding From Software forever now, it’ll be more money than selling them.
