It's not about the number of games, its about a select number of heavy hitters.
PlayStation has way more heavy hitters than Xbox. Not only in exclusive games, there are also many multiplatform games (mostly Japanese ones) that don't release on Xbox. To lose one or two of them (or not, remember the many games MS and subsidiaries published on PS) won't change anything because they represent a small portion of the game sales in PS.
Remember that around 1.7 billion games were sold for PS4 before the PS5 release. Until now, maybe they are 2B or even more. Zenimax sold maybe aroud 50M games for PS4 being generous combining all their titles. Even if they were 100M it would continue being a tiny portion of the PS4 game sales. Same goes with the amount of users who played them, a small portion. And the subset of that, player who would leave if they become exclusive, also is tiny compared to their total userbase.
The market data show that these pubishers are big, but only a small portion of the super giant markets that are gaming, consoles or PS. You overestimate how important these game publishers are.
I shown countless times here the CoD numbers vs PS numbers and they are only a very small portion of the PS business, and that Sony would recover the players lost if it goes exclusive in less than a year. And this is CoD, which is by far bigger than any other game series MS bought other than Minecraft, which are not relevant at all for PS and btw basically all of them continue as multi receiving their new games and DLC on PS.
You say Sony don't care if MS own ABK, yet they've just spent several months battling Microsoft in hopes of getting regulatory bodies to shut down the MS/ABK deal. So it'd seem like they do care, to some extent. And I can guarantee you they would DEFINITELYcare if they made COD, Diablo, Overwatch, even Crash and Spyro exclusive. In some cases not necessarily monetarily, but more out of optics perception. The egg on face for an IP tied so closely to PlayStation's roots like Crash, going exclusive to Xbox, would IMO be as bad for Sony as KOTOR Remake getting announced as a PS5 console exclusive was for Microsoft.
A lot of those gazillion games you're referring to, are a lot smaller and insignificant in terms of individual market impact than the select crop of big market IP and, yes, Sony has a decent number of those in-house. Spiderman, God of War, Gran Turismo et.
In companies the important thing is the factual data, not personal opinions or perception. The factual data says how many players move each IP and the amount of money thy make and the trend they had over time for each title they released.
From wikipedia: "As of 2007, the
Spyro the Dragon series has sold over 20 million units worldwide." The recent Sony big hits (Spider-Man, God of War, Horizon, TLOU etc) sell over 20M each or almost.
Again, you are overestimating these ABK IPs. Specially on their current state and that some like Diablo, Overwatch or Warcraft/WoW are/were popular mostly on other platforms like PC and not that much in PS.
But among 3P, I think that number in terms of pertinent IP isn't as big as you think. Take among Japanese 3P IP for example, off the top of my head there's Street Fighter, Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry (all four of those from a single publisher BTW), Tekken, Elden Ring, Metal Gear Solid, Dead or Alive, Persona, Shin Megami Tensei, Sonic, Yakuza, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest...those are mainly the big ones IMO. Notice those are all just from a whopping SIX publishers? You don't think Sony gives a shit if any of those 3P publishers, let alone two of them, ended up acquired by a competitor like Microsoft?
Sony would fight to keep them as they are fighting to keep CoD. They obviously give a shit. Regulators very likely will approve (as most of them already did) the ABK one, but if later they go to chase 6 big ones more -specially if would go at the same time- maybe would block it. And Sony would make some big reaction even if as market leader in different markets regulators maybe would allow them to buy big publishers.
If we look at their yearly revenue (let's use companiesmarketcap.com for this example): Capcom has $0.76B, Bandai Namco $7.56B, Square Enix $2.61B, Sega Sammy $2.68B, Konami $2.34B. This is a combined $16B, even if a big chunk of that isn't from gaming.
This would around a 8% market share of the total gaming market (around $200B) if all their revenue would be from game (which isn't, a big chunk is from other business), twice as big as ABK. But again, a big chunk of the revenue of these companies isn't from games and inside the games one a big portion isn't from consoles, and a big chunk of the console ones isn't from PS. So their real impact in the console wars would be very likely way smaller than the ABK acquisition.
In any case that won't happen first because first these companies apparently don't want or need to sell. Second because for cultural reasons and because of the investors they have they'd prefer to sell to Japanese companies with basically the same investors. Third because if they sell would be to grow, not to lose their main market, PS.
Nothing leads to think MS will/can buy these 6 (even if they could want to), but the impact on PS would be smaller than the one of getting ABK. As happens with (according to both MS and the regulators) ABK to make their big titles exclusive wouldn't make finantial sense, so even in the super unlikely case of them being acquired by MS pretty likely they, or most of their main games, would continue on PS. So the negative impact of the acquisition would be way smaller of the already small impact that the ABK acquisition will have.
Did Sony's forecasts account for acquisitions like ABK? Did they account for potentially other big 3P acquisitions by companies like Microsoft or another Big Tech company that may have incentive to foreclose software options on PlayStation to benefit their own gaming ecosystem? Did they account for the potential impacts of losing out on revenue due to not being able to lock down content deals for games like COD going forward?
I don't see why Sony would forecast acquisitions they can't afford as ABK. They forecast the smaller scale acquisitions and investments they make, are working to make, or considered (but maybe saw it wasn't a good fit or that they didn't want to sell, or at least to them) to make.
Having also the PS market data, the gaming market data, and the 3P publishers market data they also forecast the potential impact of acquisitions made by their direct competitors, like the ABK one which in fact they provided it to regulators. Reguators who, other than the couple of remaining ones approved it or considered that the impact of the acquisition didn't worry them for the console market.
@ethomaz already pointed out elsewhere how it looks like Sony's PC software revenue forecasts look like they'll come up well short of projections, so it's obvious forecasts can't account for every possibility and sometimes end up overshooting.
In the related thread I shown that some his personal estimates are pretty wrong and that if we use a pretty conservative but way more realistic estimate using the most accurate/popular -but obviously still an estimate with a big margin of error- methodology and counting all their PC games instead of cherrypicking some shows that apparently Sony generated around $300M in revenue from the PC ports until the end of this recent FY. Which as I remember was what Sony had forecasted for that FY.
What if these GaaS titles don't hit?
What if they underperform in revenue? A lot of Sony's projections for market share increase might be predicated too much on things with uncertain provability, and/or a more conservative Microsoft that didn't go for big 3P game publisher acquisitions (or being more conservative in terms of not leveraging acquired content to foreclose on PlayStation software offerings to help grow Xbox and Game Pass).
Destiny 2, GT7 and MLB are hitting. I'm pretty sure the Bungie, Deviation, Firewalk or Haven new IPs are safe bets, like TLOU Online due to their pedigree. Jimbo said that if only a few of them succed it could mean a transformative success for them. So they obviously assume that some of them may not succed, as happens with non GaaS games.
But GaaS are also only around a third or a quarter of the new games they have under development. They mentioned that GaaS/PC/mobile efforts aren't made at the expenses of their efforts on traditional SP console games, that instead they are also doubling down their effort on these type of games and that the efforts on GaaS/PC/mobile are on top of that.
Regarding revenue, Sony is pretty good making projections and forecasts and normally achieve them or outperform them because I assume that in most companies they are often conservative and consider that some of their projects won't succeed. In the Jimbo era Sony also kept improving their profitability year after year even in the middle of a crossgenerational transition, where they always had loses due to big R&D costs and lower previous gen support, engagement and recurring revenue to compensate it. They also had a long and steady history of properly managing their teams, specially in recent years.
So I'm very confident on SIE's future, starting with FY results they'll show in a few months, where I expect to see as usual several record numbers. I expect MS to continue mismanaging their acquired and older teams and underperforming compared to PS, plus also expect PS to continue dominating Xbox and PS Plus to continue dominating GP. I expect MS to continue making broken promises that they never achieve or deliver (like the Kinect and the power of the cloud ones with Mylo and so on) and Sony to continue letting their GOTY candidate games do the talk and to continue destroying in sales the MS ones.
Just like how I think
@Welfare makes the mistake of clinging too close to Microsoft's fiscal results without ever questioning them,
you're potentially making the mistake of taking Sony's future forecasts as gospel without ever questioning what conditions they predicted market-wise over the gen to formulate those forecasts.
Companies can't lie with their fiscal results. But as MS does they can hide some ugly ones. Halo Infinite and the Zenimax acquisitions were supposed to change anything and MS even stopped sharing the GP game subs.
Sony continues being transparent sharing many record numbers and achieving or even increasing their forecasts. Obviously some day may be wrong or both Sony or MS can change, but as of now they are like this.
Like I said, you're being too much a bean counter and aren't looking at things from the bigger picture. There are trends in the market that cumulatively coalesce to form the numbers you keep referring to, and you're refusing to see what the realities of optics (specifically optics/perception momentum) can have in terms of influencing people in the market.
The realities of the market is that AAA keep getting more expensive to make so Sony invest in more revenue sources, specially in the other AAA market that doesn't damage them (PC), the business model that generates most of the revenue (GaaS) and the biggest gaming market in userbase and revenue where they have a lot of room to grow (mobile). So Sony in addition to grow in their current areas also invests to grow there.
Same goes with MS, with the difference that they had less top tier dev teams and IPs, aren't capable to produce them so had to buy them. The reality of the market is that Sony makes way more revenue and profit from games than MS, and dominates them with a 2:1 difference or more in console sales, game subs, and pretty likely total console games sold, exclusives sold, first party game solds, game reviews and awards etc.
The realities seen in factual data, and not in opinion, show that the ABK and Zenimax players from PS who would leave if these games go exclusive are a tiny portion of the total, that would be compensated quickly by the PS growth, and that most of the PS players don't play their games. So the impact of these acquisitions are going to be minimal and that would be in the case all or most of their game go console exclusive which may not be the case.
I analize the factual market data, which shows the reality. Your "perception momentum" is your personal opinion. The factual data says that most PS4 didn't buy Zenimax or ABK games and bought other games instead, so I highly doubt that even if all the ones who bought them leave (which won't happen if all their future games go full exclusive, which, we'll have to see if it's the case), that MS, Zenimax and ABK have a small market share and that PS dominates Xbox by a wide margin way bigger than Zenimax and ABK could compensate even if going full console exclusive for all their future games.
So maybe the move of the acquisition is a PR stunt that wows you, but the market data says that won't change things so much. As happened when they were selling Kinect saying that was even going to track fingers and devs knew it was total bullshit because wasn't possible with a 320x240 camera tracking people placed a few meters away. Or as happened with the Hellblade 2 CG announcement when they still hadn't started the production of the game and were years away from having UE5 ready to use.
I prefer to look at factual data because helps me filter the bulshit that their PR stunts may make you think.
You're really going to sit here and say that if Microsoft bought THREE prominent Japanese 3P publishers,
3? Why not 3000? It's just fantasy. As of now, they are buying zero. And pretty likely they won't buy a single big Japanese publisher because they won't want or need to sell. Because most of them are performing better than they ever did and are in a growing trend, which is a point where as investor you don't want to sell because means that soon your company will have more value if the growing trend continues.
And if they would sell, would happen the same than with ABK: they would acquired and basically nothing would change. With the difference that the Japanese publishers are smaller specially if you only look at their gaming console part, and particularly the console one. So the impact would be smaller because there are less fans -a smaller portion of PS players- buying their games.
A large part of Sony's dominance relied on being the defacto platform for 3P developers to focus their efforts on, usually because Sony offered the best mixture of tech, dev support, licensing, marketing, distribution, platform stability and innovation. That then also allowed them to enter special co-development relationships with certain 3P developers, for PlayStation exclusives to further bolster the strength of their library.
Yes, and Sony does that with a ton of companies. PS is by far the console with the biggest 3P support and will continue being that after the ABK acquisition. And even if MS acquires 3 or 6 top Japanese 3P. Because there's a gazillion more. And btw, one of the most important ones is MS: remember that being sold to MS doesn't mean to leave PS.
But none of that matters in a market where the amount of key 3P developers is shrinking,
The amount of 3P developers, publishers and games grows every generation. Some are bought or shut down, but a bigger number of them appear. In many cases with the key talent of those acquired or shut down a few years before.
Even if companies like Microsoft keep that 3P content on PlayStation, it is no better than Sony being subservient and having their platform generate money that 70% of which now goes directly to a competitor (such as Microsoft), rather than an independent 3P publisher.
If MS removes CoD from PS, Sony would lose 30% of that money and MS would lose 70% of that money. Only a portion of these PS CoD users, a tiny portion of the PS total players, would leave PS. And only a portion of them don't already have a gaming PC or Xbox. Most of the PS players would remain on PS, and the very small portion of them who bought CoD and remain there now would buy other game instead of CoD, so Sony would still get this 30%. So Sony would only lose the 30% of the players who would leave, which is a tiny portion of their total userbase and would replaced in aprox. less than a year with new users.
So by far who would be more negatively affected by removing CoD from PS would be ABK/MS. The regulators know that to remove CoD from PS wouldn't really damage PS, and also know that it wouldn't make finantial sense for MS because the extra players and revenue that would provide to their ecosystem wouldn't compensate by far the one they'd lose from PS.
So the future movement of growth Sony could have with the publisher of those games no longer exists, since that publisher is now owned by a direct platform rival, or a Big Tech company that might keep the games multiplat, but only until they can get something of their own going. Either way it puts Sony in a weak and subservient position as a platform holder because the growth of those IP and those games has to be placed completely in the faith of the companies that now own them. And no matter what, Sony can't engage in growth with that 3P publisher at all because they are no longer an independent entity.
Most Sony studios in the past only worked on a single game at the same time. Now they grew or are growing to work in 3 or 4 games at the same time. Some of the games made by these studios sell over 20M units on PS, which is more than what CoD sells on PS. And Sony gets 100% from them, instead of 30%.
This movement of increasing the staff of their already existing studios will generate Sony more yearly revenue than what ABK generated yearly to Sony. And that will be on top of other strategies to grow like acquisitions, 3rd party deals, 2nd party deals, movies/tv shows/pc ports/mobile/eSports/etc, betting more on MP and GaaS etc.
This 3P publisher, MS, will continue publishing on PS. But the money Sony invested on CoD for marketing now will be invested instead in other of the many top AAA games that are out there in PS.
And your assertion, and deafening quickness to buy into Phil Spencer's marketing spiel, is hilarious considering the CMA called Microsoft on that bluff and said, if it's really just about King, why not divest COD?
Only you said it's just about King.
MS wants to buy everything, so will try to buy everything. King would give them more new players and profits than CoD, but CoD would give make their 1st party and GP lineup more attractive. So MS wants both.
That market data is based on the past. A past that can very easily change, especially in a quickly changing market.
No, the facts are facts, the long term trends don't easily change and gaming isn't a quickly changing market. This is why profesionals make forecasts with projections of data from the past and this is why they are pretty accurate.
To ignore the facts and data of the past to make forecasts of the future is only for fan guesses.
There is almost no way of knowing if Microsoft's provided data has been completely honest and transparent;
They take months to analyze these things because they verify a lot of stuff both with internal MS, ABK, Sony, etc. numbers (finantials, accountability numbers) and also with the market data provided by NPD, GSD etc plus market analysis firms like Newzoo, IDG and so on.
at best there are probably some white lies mixed in with things they've mentioned.
Yes, there may be some minor ones. But they can't lie about the amount the important one like consoles sold, games sold, revenue and operating income made, market share, amount of game subs, deals signed with/paid to 3rd parties.
I don't really know what you are being here, but I do know you're being a lot like
@Welfare in how subservient you are to any data that can easily confirm your pre-existing biases in the line of this discussion, in your cases even going as far as to agree with something a known liar like Phil Spencer has said, unironically, just to keep thinking Xbox will forever stay in the same place forever no matter how many publishers Microsoft buys, and that Sony is forever impervious to any loss of independent 3P publishers because you read hard into some forecasts for growth that probably don't even account for a very aggressive Microsoft in the market (or anything out of the ordinary).
My bias as Sony fan is that I would prefer to keep CoD on PS and if possible not bought by MS. And I'd like to see Sony buying Capcom, my favority publisher.
But I look at the factual data and it says what it says: that CoD being acquired and even if going full console exclusive basically won't change things in the console market. And that looking at the bigger picture of the complete gaming market the acquisition is even less important and that in that global complete context for MS is more important the acquisition of King than CoD. Because in addition to give them more new users and profits mobile is a way bigger market that has a bigger growth, meaning that in the long term the growth in mobile will be even more important.
And that Capcom is in a position where very likely won't want to sell, and that gave the SF movie rights to a company that isn't Sony/PlayStation produtions, which makes me think they don't plan to sell to Sony, and that the likely Capcom acquisition price would be likely bigger than the remaining Sony budget, and that Sonys acquisition strategies until now aren't in line with acquiring big publishers like Capcom.
That is the difference between Microsoft and Sony, and it's the reason why a large majority would be rather fine with Sony acquiring the publishers I mentioned, but be very wary of Microsoft doing the same. Historical precedent matters.
There are many differences between MS and Sony.
But regarding acquisitions, the difference is that most acquired Sony games become way more successful than they have been before after being acquired. While in the case of MS in most cases they aren't capable to repeat at MS with new games the success they had with games made before joining MS.
And that happens because MS focuses on acquiring big brands, big names to get attention even if the key talent who made them big isn't already there, while Sony focuses instead on acquiring proven talent capable of making top tier games and new IPs.
