Long term they would probably save money then pay for money hatting wach game
I doubt they paid that much, and itâs not even a guarantee they will continue to money that SE titles long term.
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Right, Sony is in a position where theyâve already got their sizable core of mature development pipelines, and theyâre running pretty smoothly. Their acquisitions and new partnerships seem to focused on PC, long-tail service games and mobile development. These are all areas where Sony were deficient, so it seems to make sense.
Longer term Iâm not very worried about them. They canât realistically stop Microsoft gaining ground in the console space, but I think itâs very plausible that Sony in 2027 is making a lot more money than Sony in 2022 regardless, which is what their shareholders care about versus forum people. Pivoting to make a ton of money in untapped markets is a perfectly good response to a major threat in your original core market - especially if itâs a threat that would cost obscene amounts of money and butcher profit margins to fight off.
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One thing Iâm curious on with sony. Is that just doing what they are doing they will always be fine. Probably not market leader but fine as in a profitable successful division.
However, what i wonder is will they truly be able to pivot before its to late. As turning course for these big companies takes so much time and Microsoft spent pretty much the entire xbox one generation getting its ducks in a line with gamepass, xcloud, PC gaming, cross progression, day one releases etc. The strategic acquistions they have made.
As 2023 has always been kind of pegged as the year that the ball Microsoft has been pushing uphill will finally reach the peak. When things get rolling and all the sudden Sony has to try to basically build a global ecosystem beyond just selling a plastic box in a real way can they actually pull it off in enough time where it matters or are they just going to pull up to table a bit too late?
Its nice to see them try to do something in the mobile space but Microsoft has King now. Microsoft bought 24 studios and they bought insomniac, bluepoint, nixxes, haven, bungie, and a couple others. It just seems like Microsoft moved on to playing chess and Sony is just now realizing they arenât playing checkers anymore.
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Realistically, Sony canât make the moves MS are making but I believe what they are doing regarding acquisitions and moving into the PC/mobile space is adequate to keep them relevant and the gaming division profitable.
Sony has too big brand recognition to fail. Especially outside USA.
Xbox One completely destroyed everything that Xbox 360 was able to achieve in Europe. It essentially brought Xbox back to OG Xbox in Europe. Except this time we have much bigger and more complex networking via Internet community so it is even more difficult to make a dent.
I donât think anyone is saying Sony is going to fail. But they havenât proven that they will be able to keep pace in the content wars and the acquisitions they have made thus far arenât exactly changing the game. There is only so many developers and studios capable of producing content at scale consistently. The next few acquisitions they make will be interesting.
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Sony will be fine, the issue is they were woefully unprepared for Microsoft coming out swinging this generation.
They were unprepared for the Microsoft CEO to be going all in on the gaming division the way he has, for the first time in Microsoft history, and that Phil would be promoted to Xbox CEO (which wasnât even a thing prior to Phil).
You can tell they were unprepared for the Bethesda purchase as seen by their current moneyhats and (almost) moneyhat of Starfield.
You can easily tell, by their statements regarding CoD, that they didnât think Microsoft would be acquiring ABK; never in a million years. They were seemingly 99.999% sure CoD would suffice as their premiere FPS and main revenue source and had no intention on making any serious first party effort in the genre.
You can tell they were unprepared for the rampant success of Xbox Game Pass, a service that continues to grow and grow like a massive snowball even without their first party games releasing on a regular cadence (which is finally coming to fruition 2023 and beyond).
You can tell they were unprepared for xCloud and cloud gaming in general. Microsoft have been pushing cloud for over a decade, and while last gen the memes were âPoWeR oF tEh cLoUd!!!,â there are no cloud memes this gen. Not anymore. The dissenters and fanboys seem to have lost that ammunition from their armory; I wonder why?
You can even tell they were unprepared for the duality of the Series S|X architecture and pricepoint(s); a smaller, more powerful premium console and a much cheaper console with the same SSD packaged in a surprisingly tiny, gorgeous box. Iâd argue, especially with their bullshit PS5 pricehike due to âinflation,â that the only reason PS5 was the price it was is because they wanted to match Microsoftâs Series X pricepoint and not have a reverse of the previous generation.
The crazy part is, this âsnowballâ effect from Microsoft/Xbox hasnât even reached itâs peak yet, and once it actually starts to roll down the momentum will be a sight to see.
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They will pivot to highly premium brand with sky high profit margins even if fthey wonât 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 donât 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.
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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.
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3x sounds far too high - is this just based on a sample of known games?
Sony now has about ~20-22 internal game pipelines (itâs 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 donât 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.
Didnât 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.
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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 2000âs, 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 âcoreâ 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.
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I think the reduction to 13 is too drastic of an assumption. I donât 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 thatâs 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 havenât 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 isnât like⌠untrue, but makes it a misleading comparison if youâre directly stacking it up against the figure Iâm giving here for Sony. Gears 6 + Alpha Point game is a good illustrative example, because technically itâs true theyâre both in âdevelopmentâ, 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 itâs not really a multi team studio like Obsidian or Insomniac is where you could assume (for scheduling purposes) that theyâre both going to come out within a year or two of each other because theyâre 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 âThe Gears Collectionâ is speculative and presumably involves partner studios, so not necessarily false in itâs own context but itâs not an apples:apples thing. And there is a lot of speculative there - Obsidian is listed as working on the following:
- Grounded
- Pentiment
- Avowed
- The Outer Worlds 2
- Fallout: New Vegas 2
- Unknown Game 1
- Unknown Game 2
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 âthe approximate list of all games theyâll release this generation / early next genâ but we canât 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 thatâs a fair metric to be discussing. There is unfortunately a lot of ambiguity in what the âtrueâ numbers we should be using for that purpose is. But I think your original figure of â3x in devâ is quite far off the mark.
Counting down from that list, Iâd 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 Sonyâs 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 Iâd 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 itâs a post-covid world so Iâm 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 isnât what we can expect right now (and thatâs true for Microsoft too, who has not been doing 5-6 games per year consistently, itâs 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.
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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 itâs 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 itâs speculative as to how many projects are VR and how many are conventional.
Post ABK, Microsoftâs 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 donât want to start another CoD argument about whether thatâs multiplat beyond 2025 lol.
This is all to get back to what I really am saying - the total # of exclusive games per year Iâm 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 theyâre still quite competitive in a mid term future, and they can make up exclusive game shortfalls largely with 3rd party dealmaking because the gap isnât 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
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If Sony had to go all in on a company, I believe EA would be worth it just for the gaas expertise and Itâll be just in time for the BioWare comeback weâve all been waiting for.
Itâs not gonna happen. EA currently worths 36 billion, Sony doesnât have that amount of cash for this level of acquisition.
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