7 Billion loss. Though Sony were prepared to lose that to win the Format war. No formats to fight about now.
I have skimmed the transcript of the earnings call, but have not had time to do any analysis or reading beyond that.
My initial reaction is that there wasn’t much (if any) good news for the gaming division. Unless I am really missing something I would find anyone trying to spin the data as positive to be pretty disingenuous.
The only numbers I see that look positive at all are overall console sales, but they are slowing - and with no meaningful price cuts coming its hard to imagine they will pass the PS4.
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Thanks! Looking forward for your in-deep analysis as always! (If you do one)
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The thing all of these company CEO’s & market leaders are really saying with their multiplatform talk “we’ll bring more games to more players” tralalala aka words like that is they’re not making enough money out of their current install base. So they’re going to attempt to sell their stuff down the street. For MS that’ll mean PC, Nintendo & Sony. For Sony it’ll mean PC… for the time being.
But what they’re really looking for is something they cannot brute force through: more consumers & more spending in the industry. The ‘console war’ might be over, but the war for consumer spending is absolutely on. It means for example (i.e. because they’re the most sought after consumers in this industry wide shakeup, apparently) one PC player will choose to spend his money wherever he wishes… but it doesn’t mean he’ll spend more.
Do people genuinely think someone who owns a PC is going to spend extra money on Sony’s games on top of what they already spend on PC games? Not likely. Someone will lose, every single time. Some games & franchises cannibalize sales, especially when they’re multiplatform. These companies will eat into each other’s profits.
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PS5’s are still expensive and they’ve just said price reductions are unlikely due to market conditions or whatever, how much are they going to have to charge in order for it not to be a big loss for them?
and will it be so high that outside of the hardest of hardcore nobody will want to pay, the pro consoles last gen were bought by the minority already
If the Pro is any kind of meaningful upgrade over the PS5 it will
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I am a bit surprised about these takes. Sonys margins were always rather low but they were also trending down for years now. So what were Grubb and Co. thinking would happen?
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I agree it’s very unlikely, however it would add a bit more logic to their ‘rumoured’ actions.
In the past I have said there was a good chance they go after Roblox but now they are valued much higher than Epic I very much doubt they are possible either.
There is one fear of homogeneity in AAA games from all this, which is that we start to get more and more games on Unreal and very few other engines.
That’s because Epic with Unreal have tried to automate / streamline making good-looking games, in order to help cut down development costs / timelines - and so have the few other widely-available engine creators.
So apart from some in-house engines that have had teams develop their own automation tools around them (i.e.; the biggest) we’ll see more and more games using the same few engines - it’s been happening already with UE4 and Unity being used for so many, but it’ll get worse…
(On the plus side, the indie scene will likely go from Unity to a variety of open-source engines after their screw up)
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I miss the days when Epic also made games rather than focus on Fortnite, even if it meant we got games that all looked very similar (Unreal Tournament 3, Gears 3 & Bulletstorm etc) which I believe was UE3.
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Say…
What happened to PSVR2 and Portal sale?
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IIRC Portal sales are part of the console sales.
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I read that Portal sales are included in ps5 sales. They should not be so much anyway.
As for psvr2, who knows.
And they still failed to meet expectations? I think Portal was only made in small doses.
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To be fair, sony market value has been growing for some time, but it is only half of what it was at ps2 launch (reflecting that the hype was crazy at that time, with inflation, it is even higher).
A potential plus will be with more and more talented AAA studios adopting UE, more valuable feedback will be collected, more knowledge will be gained and shared, better documentation and tools will be made available and a better engine and products due to that. It’s not all bad, could be just like Photoshop though where they could monopolize the market with horrible pricing models, Unity already attempted that.
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Circana fought back on that and they’re no longer included
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People who were saying the console market is shrinking are right:
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https://twitter.com/Kepler_L2/status/1757877728853025137
Soooooo yeah…things have to change. It also make you wonder. Will PS5 pro really worth it?
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If you’ve heard the rumored specs and can guess the price. Nope. Pretty much means PS6/Series X2 are going to be $699 and have a 4-5 year cross gen period. Going to be a tiny market and wont be healthy at all.
It will still be the cheapest place to play games though compared to PC. Maybe then Xbox All-Access actually becomes more and more appealing. If I were MS I’d capitalize on this as prices keep going up and affordability goes down.
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