Final Fantasy and Insomniac are carrying PS5 exclusives for these 2-3 years basically, at this point FF is basically 1st party because even PC release is time excluded.
The big AAA stuff from Naughty Dog, Santa Monica, Guerella (?) Sucker Punch, will probably be very late in the generation.
Apple no longer needs PlayStation seeing how its phones will now be able to run AAA games
With the live service title from Deviation cancelled and TLOU Factions delayed indefinitely, it seems the pivot to GAAS has been sloooow. Microsoft will have a big window of opportunity over the next 2-3 years.
Sony is not lying with the reason why they bought Bungie.
Contrary to what PlayStation fans might tell you, these studios are not universally above the entire industry. Many of these studios have little to no experience in making GaaS games and I am not surprised if some have found it really tough going.
Whoever takes over permanently for Jim Ryan (Not Hiroki Totoki, whoâs only interim.) is going to be held responsible for his GaaS push flopping.
Sonyâs GaaS push should have started and finished with acquiring Bungie. It legitimately was the smartest decision under Jim Ryanâs command that was actually his decision and not made by a predecessor with him taking credit for it. (See: PlayStation 5âs first party lineup up until Spider-Man 2. Those games took a while to make, so we know Jim didnât green light them.) Let Bungie do what theyâre good at. Let your other studios do what theyâre good at. Instead they went with âBuy Bungie, have them do what theyâre good at, and then have all our studios try to also do what Bungieâs good at.â
Doesnât really work like that unfortunately.
I am willing to bet Sony is looking at having a couple of successful GaaS games and as we have seen with other publishers, the success rate is not high. Plus their first party is large but not big enough to not have most of their studios at least dabbling in GaaS.
Dabbling is fine but from what is coming out it seems a good chunk from their studios is to produce gaas.
Which has caused friction, itâs sounding alot More like we heard about redfall where the developers who were there did not want to work on a gaas, mp title and left.
As well as the other titles we saw this year didnât show well.
But combined all the issues as wel as spending a ton of money to try and block the abk deal and in the end getting a worse deal then what was originally offered may have been the final nail in the coffin
From the financials slide we saw a 60 - 40% split of GaaS - Traditional Sony fare.
They (probably a Jim interview, donât recall) have also given the impression that the 60% GaaS would be on top of current single player output.
Not sure that their acquisitions and âorganicâ expansions would allow for them to up the output of GaaS without touching the resource available for trad. games though, so could be smoke and mirrors to pacify the faithful.
It could be what they are aiming for , my questions for that would be I what part of the budget the 60% is coming from?
As well I wonder if flipping part of the pipeline of games using close to the same tech due to almost all being single player 3rd person action games to gaas is causing delays (not just the last of us one) and or big problems.
Not sure if related by naught dog just let go a bunch of contractors this morning⌠Edit: apparently factions is on ice this came out after I posted so⌠huh thatâs what 3 gaas titles cancelled of the 12?
Also before anyone says something, yes I am very aware games get cancelled all the time in development we never hear about.
The difference being this was a very public move for Sony , one of the reason their first party was able to reliable bring in big titles at a steady clip was due to how the studios operated, I can only image if the shoe was on the other foot, how media and fan boys would take it
I couldnât find the OG reporting that showed the slides where it is easier to see future budget v current and the trad game v GaaS split, but there are some numbers here but this only gives a total game R&D budget and a percentage split for PS5 dev budget:
âIt plans to allocate 55% of PlayStation 5 game development spending to live service games in the year ending March 2024, and 60% for the year ending March 2026.â
But as we donât know what % of game R&D is allocated to PS5 games dev. we canât calculate anything meaningful from this as youâd imagine things like metaverse would eat up some of the top level figure.
Iâve got no time to look around anymore at teh moment but if I do find the OG graphs Iâll add them here.
Chickens really are coming home to roost for Sony here. Their inability to move beyond a low or no growth potential model is biting them hard here.
I really do think they are in quite a lot of trouble.
Sony is showing weakness right now. If I was Microsoft, after the ABK deal closes, they should go on a marketing blitz associating COD, Blizzard(successful GAAS games lol) etc. with the Xbox ecosystem, perfect time to prop up your product.
To be honest, if it wasnât for their acquisition of Bungie, they would have been in trouble financially. Their 200 million dollar games that come out after 5 years of development is not sustainable without other forms of income from GAAS or Mobile that would help with its development cost. Bungie is that GAAS expert they need, time will tell if they actually have a hit on their hands with Marathon etc.
I have been saying this for a while, Sony might be boasting its console sales or first party studios from the outside, but on the inside, they are bleeding financially. They desperately need a mobile(studios) or successful GAAS games to compliment their first party single player games. Jim Ryan had the right foresight of the gaming industry to be honest, buts itâs hard to compete with Fortnite, COD, Minecraft, Apex etc. Now that itâs almost certain ABK will be owned by their rival, they are in more dire situation than we think.
That is one of the thing they canât do until way later. Marketing prevents MS from associating with COD outside of Xbox-exclusive spaces.
From Sonyâs Financial Report 2023 page 23 right hand side @ https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/business_segment_meeting/pdf/2023/GNS.pdf
The pixel counting taken from the XE Discord discussion, user strawman
You know I just cant blame Jim Ryan. His predecessor confirmed back in the ps4 generation their games are no longer sustainable being exclusives and thatâs the reason they started their PC port planning (which so far is failing). According to some CMA files their big games during that era were already costing $200+ to make (TLOU P2 and Forbideen west were examples in the document) so how much will their games cost to make this generation? How much it will cost in future generations?
Jim Ryan has also confirmed their games are not sustainable due to how expensive is to make them and I assume the small ROI these games brings to PS, thats why his tenure initiated the âbeyond consoleâ push which is basically a PC, mobile and GAAS movement and I expect his successor to push this strategy if not the same, even harder as Totoki during interviews after their reports has said he wants to make more profit out of the PS division. So they are also pursuing GAAS because they need them and people believing they will start reducing investment in their new initiatives are being naive.
Thatâs the one, and if we assume that the total revenue scaling (total size of bars) is equivalent across years then it makes the picture easier to understand.
And as someone who makes external presentations thatâs not something Iâd ever mess with to give a false impression as most customers would pick it up straight away but who knows what some people would do.
Also from the same perspective the uneven gaps are also interesting, yes it could be just a way to keep the graph clean but if that was the case it makes more sense to show the last 3 years consecutive. So Iâd speculate that the data for those years messes up the message they are trying to get across with the slide.
Mostly agree but I just canât shake the feeling that they shouldâve just focused more on â2ndâ party games and new studios/acquisitions like theyâve done already tbh, but without the need to extend it to a lot of their big studios, like seriously why does Insomniac need to make a mp/gaas game when they bring all that money and people to PS with Spider-Man? Why does Naughty Dog need to, when theyâre the most important studio they have that basically made and defined their whole 1st party operation, yes they are expensive, but they also bring in money wit their IP not just through games but the movie and TV show, TLOU sells good. Iâm not saying they shouldnât make a Factions game that is a good thing to have (TLOU MP was cool) but it shouldnât have to be that huge live-service thing.
Of course.
People didnât want to admit it because their hardware is so popular but that popularity has an expiration date, namely the lifecycle of the PS5.
They need to feed owners of the console with content between now & 2028. Itâs no use selling lots of consoles if the offerings are going to be derivative GAAS which Ryan in all his greed believed would make the company richer.
I think that pivot to GAAS happened at a time when The Last of Us 2 was costing them a couple of hundred million dollars to make. They figured they couldnât continue relying on the âcinematic third personâ genre when it costs so much to make. Itâs why I shrug a little when I read comments from people (like on other era) who say Factions getting axed is âgood newsâ because ND can now do what they do best, aka make another single player blockbuster i.e. because Sony would have to give them a casual few hundred million dollars again to make that happen.
Sony doesnât have infinite cash & the sale of the hardware (whatever profits they make) wonât generate enough money to make AAA cinematic games which release every year.
I understand the GAAS push by Jim, I do. But I think he should have focused on acquisitions of studios that have experience with GAAS (even failed ones) not brand new studios or making single player studio they already have make GAAS. Bungie but on a much smaller scale.
That or stick with publishing deals like they are with a few other studios.
I feel like part of it is so they could be like look naughty dog made this!!! See from the creators of last of us or insert whatever title.
Itâs going to be interesting to say the least for the next ceo to come in and get this resolved with figuring out how to grow be it mobile or day one pc games that are not broken messes.
Do they go hard in 3rd party exclusives like ff16? Did that move the needle for the cost, especially sense it seems squares new ceo didnât think the deal was great
