Sony could as well. People forget they have a lot of cash on hand as well. It’s not enough to buy a large publisher most likely, but it’s enough to incur losses and still be fine. Having said that, that cash is for Sony proper and not just the Playstation division, but they could use it for that purpose if they wanted to. But, as everyone keeps saying, it’s probably too much of a risk for them and quite possibly they just don’t believe the math works out for them.
Either way, this could be a “tomato, tomahto” type of conversation where everyone is basically in agreement but we’re arguing over semantics.
Also, people keep acting like they would have to create the infrastructure for such a model, but PS+ is already a thing. The only difference is they don’t put their 1st party titles in day and date and don’t spend as much as MS does on 3rd party day one titles.
Cloud is expensive and a very high margin product. Microsoft will work it out as the most tax beneficial method but the actual costing will likely be 40% less for xbox as compared to Sony. Between what was leaked during the FTC trial(think Microsoft worked it out to $0.40 per hour costing) and the cost of boosteroid and Nvidia’s cloud streaming at 1080p 60fps to see cloud gaming is very expensive to run especially as to make it really viable you need to include a library of games to do it
They had the chance to make something good with PS+ but instead at the start of the PS4 era they put the online paywall behind it and (also due to no backwards compatibility) started to include/promote indie titles with the whole PS loves indies marketing line, then apparently the love for indies faded because they wanted to position themselves as the platform for "Prestige "AAA bangers and then they made the service worse and worse over time because they were the market leader and didn’t give a fuck which now translates into a service that is in a worse position than they expected.
To even start and put up a plan to make a Game Pass competitor will take years and as you said there is no guarantee for it’s success. In other words there is no easy way out of their non sustainable business model, curious to see what they will do in the next few years. mjpopcorn.gif
Side note: the pure abandonment of the Vita is one of the reasons I genuinely despise Sony as a company (at least this iteration of the company that’s existed over the last 12 years), that system is easily in the top three for my favorite handhelds of all time, and just like so many other things they make that consist of great hardware, a decent initial 1P showing, they basically gave up and forced a complete reliance on third-parties - sure there were issue, like their obsession with proprietary media, but it was a fantastic piece of kit and that OLED is still solid. I’m just waiting another two months for PSVR2 to be completely abandoned by them as well at this rate. Why anyone buys any of their products, aside from their mainline PS, at this point is beyond me - don’t even get me started on the TVs that never received HDMI features every other OLED panel of that year supported, and Sony advertised with…
Edit: actually taking bets on which new product Sony will ditch first… the Portal or VR2
I completely agree about the Vita. Why they abandoned that so swiftly still confuses and angers me. They’re like the hardware equivalent of Google at this point.
How so? I would say the opposite is true. Between the FTC and insomniac leaks we know xbox has a significant advantage in user numbers when it comes to the higher tiers of subscription services so it’s likely Microsoft will have an advantage on the per user cost for third party games in the subscription market. Then you add xbox having a larger amount of studios that make games that can be monetized outside of the base game(micro transactions and dlc). Xbox has been all in on gamepass so their strategy has been aligned with that. For playstation to pivot in that direction is going to take a fairly big shift.
The costs would mostly be made up of server infrastructure & maintenance, content (1st party + 3rd party) and advertising. Azure is only going to give MS/Xbox an advantage in the first one and Sony would likely be have the advantage with 3rd party content deals. Xbox 1st party content library might help make up some of that ground now, but that remains to be seen.
Cheaper total, but not per user. Same with server costs. Also as is being discussed in other threads, the GP/GPU and PS+ XXXtra/Premium/Alpha/Ex tiers user base are more comparable than the console sales.
These numbers are awful when you realize how many consoles they sold each gen. Their attach rates compared to Nintendo are terrible, especially when you consider how much bundling/discounting they’ve had to do just to reach this.
