'Gutted' doesn't mean reduced to zero. What staff they have is a shadow of what was formerly present prior to the reductions in 2021, and communication the past couple of years is proof of it IMO.
The reality is that, as they also did in other SIE shared departments, what they did during these years has been to unify the different local teams they had working separatedly and partly uncoordinated (mostly split into SIE America, EU and JP teams) into a global team with a unified, shared mission, sharing talent and knowledge across the globe to take coordinated actions.
According to their words, to do it in marketing as Apple does: with a global marketing message slightly localized, instead of having totally different campaigns. That optimizes the costs and helps them make bigger campaigns reaching more people.
As a result, during the Jimbo era got record numbers in social media, youtube and also in hardware and softare sales and revenue/profit.
They also did the same with theid 2nd party publishing/XDEV teams: originally each one of their 3 regional branches reported to a local gamedev team and worked intependently. They now have each one their own office and are coordinated in a global team, which btw is growing like their gamedev teams.
Also, do you have any source to back that they reduced their marketing team? Because since they are getting better marketing results now I'd say that if somehing they may have increased it instead, as they have been doing this years in their internal gamedev and 2nd party publishing teams.
It sold like 5 million copies in a few days? Seems pretty sustainable to me.
What is the alternative to a "one off" game? Just GaaS right? And of course those are so cheap to produce and support. What a stupid opinion.
I'm honestly kinda starting to burn out on this stuff.
Sony is perfectly fine with their "one off" games, it's a really successful and profitable business for them. But it's true that generation after generation the budgets keep growing to a point that they are getting maybe too high (but still not an issue to Sony, but is making them riskier). There's also a market trend where revenue from game sales is being replaced by addons revenue (dlc/iap/passes), leading to think that in the long term may be an issue.
What Sony is doing is, in addition to continue growing their 'one off' lineup, to also increase their bet in GaaS with other games made mainly by other teams, plus to get extra revenues and fanbase with pc ports made by other teams, and tv show/movies adaptations by other teams, plus smaller 'one off' secondary side projects made by other smaller teams, plus in the future mobile games made by other teams. They also pushed secondary areas like accessories relasing a ton of cool stuff plus the game subs with the PS plus overhaul to get extra revenue per user.
The general idea is to generate more additional revenue and profit with more things in all areas to reduce the risk of the big projects in cases where one of them tanks hard or gets cancelled.
Their strategy so far is working very well, they are being very successful and are having a great grow in any area. Sony isn't worried at all: the opposite, they often post record numbers in almost every area.
Mobile gaming is the only area where they still have to start to grow hard, SIE has a plan for mobile gaming and are working on it but will need more time to show results. Sony is a global top 10-20 mobile gaming publisher but with games from other divisions, not SIE.
Pretty likely the mission of the next SIE CEO will be to continue growing in all their existing areas but to specially grow in mobile with both native games and cloud gaming.
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