GAAS is a necessary evil for Playstation

Yobo

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Like it or not, Sony needs a successful GAAS. Maybe multiples

Game development is only getting more expensive with a ceiling on revenue from single player games. That margin between profitability and failure will only diminish over time. Soon enough games will need to sell 10 million just to break even.

GAAS may not be the games we play but they can be the safety net that can keep PlayStation Studios well funded into the future

Right now Sony is in the precarious position where a lot of revenue comes from third party GAAS success, where they only make 30% and where COD can be directly attributed to helping fund PlayStation Studios


And all of that is at more and more risk as Microsoft buys up publishers

Just one to two major hits for GAAS will be a game changer. Single player bangers are what we buy the systems for but GAAS will be what keeps the lights on
 

KnittedKnight

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13 Jul 2022
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No.

An absolute false premise to justify a vision and a corporate decision to go a certain route. Basically Fear mongering with a foreign enemy as usual being the evil prop lurking in the shadows - works every time on many sheep - comes from politics - psycological trap for the mind.

PlayStation will survive just like it survived during the PS3 era without a big FPS, and all their failures in this regard trying to chase COD, Battlefield and Halo.... they'll survive again. Their salvation was cinematic, AAA, high quality single-player games - a niche overlooked and unexploited while everyone was after the next COD. "Without a big shooter you can't survive! Ha ha Uncharted!"

PlayStation will survive just like it survived during the PS4 era where the nascent GAAS model actually took off, not in the PS5 generation. It's a transient fad.

No one is saying SIE can not try to get their feet wet GAAS wise with some projects here or there but when the allocation of resources goes 50/50 or greater in favor of GAAS vs. everything else that is not the way to go. They already pocketed Bungie, with Destiny, one of the TOP GAAS games on the market + their future GAAS projects. Bungie is now in house. Moreover they profit the most with third-party royalties on any GAAS game in the industry, including the biggest of them all - Fornite.

Not only is it a crazy idea to put half of your eggs on the GAAS basket, it's guaranteed failure on a massive, billions of dollars scale and a disaster in the making. Failures will be felt and hard and SIE is not playing to their strengths. This is not an organic push, this is a rush to cash in. It would be even more counter productive if in the process of getting into this fad, they miss the next evolution of the "next hot thing" (the next thing after GAAS). Sony should strive to be at the vanguard trying to innovate and be a trendsetter exploring various ideas, finding new niches, not in effect being a trend follower trying to squeeze one IP on a crowded market with very well established players. An insane GAAS push is myopic creative destruction on a big scale - like hanging by a thread - the thread being a high risk bet that you may cash 1 GAAS game in and cover the graveyard of failures left behind. The amount of resources that they're allocating to this push, and the opportunity cost of that money being allocated elsewhere into safer or more manageable bets is big not to mention also potentially counter-productive risk taking.

Moreover, given the potential for sequential failures (several duds in succession) in such a tricky market, SIE is setting themselves up exactly for what OP's premise intends to prevent (the supposed competitor threat that will consume PS unless you do X (in this case GAAS)). All big publishers have in some way or another struggled mightily in this regard, Warner, Square, Ubisoft/ EA, even ABK (who happens to be reduced to a COD churning machine).

The graveyard:

Avengers
Anthem
Gotham Knights
Suicide Squad (???) - def not look too hot.
Babylon's Fall
Crossfire X
Halo Infinite (marquee franchise dead).
Redfall
Overwatch 2 on shaky ground

+ more and many more to come.

Success:

Fornite
COD Warzone
Genshin Impact (nice niche find).
Final Fantasy XIV
Valorant
Rainbow Six Siege
Apex Legends
+ others.

Mostly shooters. Always the common trend. Moreover to support successful GAAS, studios blow up in size. Yet you never know when the plug is going to be pulled on your game because it became Yesterday's news. No game lasts forever and there are many studios now riding high on this GAAS wagon who will see bloody days when their audience shifts to something else. Their inflated workforce will not be manageable on crumbs and you better hope you saved enough for that rainy day.

Reminds me of: "Nintendo must go mobile." "MARIO everywhere - multiplat." We know how that ended. The Switch, their most successful, profit wise, console to date. Market share/footprint wise that still belongs to the Wii + DS combo era.

If you want a justification for going GAAS full steam ahead you will always find reasons and come up with them. But likewise you can come up with a justification for a vision where GAAS is non-existant, minimal or where your exposure is not highly significant in your overall portfolio. It's called a vision - not all visions pan out, not all ideas are good, not all trends fit on one sized shoe.

Fear mongering for conformity to the current vision of PS leadership is absolutely not needed on forums and boards by normal fans. It's a disservice to discourse. Nor is your conformity required for you to continue to be an obsessed fan of the brand - I see a lot of posters struggle with this: associating "brand allegiance" with conformity to leadership direction - crazy but it's a human thing. What's left of the Xbox fanbase is perfect case study but most obviously you'll find it in the 150m or so gamers on the PS ecosystem - even higher numerically speaking.
 
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John Elden Ring

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Both Microsot and PlayStation want to have their own version of Fortnite, Microsoft turning Halo: Infinite into a GaaS and PlayStation pumping 10 of these games is an attempt at that.
 
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Nitro

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Sadly, I agree. The industry landscape is evolving. I remember when Game Pass was gaining momentum and calls for Sony to follow Microsoft with day one PS Plus releases grew impossibly loud. The consensus was that Sony would first need several live service games (as Microsoft already had) before contemplating such a leap. That logic hasn't changed.

No point sticking our heads in the sand, saying Sony will be fine as more and more AAA games disappear from their storefront.

The timing is super unfortunate. A gap in their single player portfolio. That disappointing presentation. Now The Last of Us multiplayer delayed in response to feedback.
 

Danja1187

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Then they should have bought Rocket League and Fall Guys when they had the chance.

Invested the resources into Naughty Dog when they tried to make Uncharted 4 multiplayer a GaaS instead they didn't allocate the budget and outside Resources to help them even finish their road map.
 

Nhomnhom

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GaaS is what you need to destroy PlayStation. It's the only thing that could steer them away from an obvious winning strategy into a fool's errand that is unlikely to ever work.
 
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Dr Bass

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Like it or not, Sony needs a successful GAAS. Maybe multiples

Game development is only getting more expensive with a ceiling on revenue from single player games. That margin between profitability and failure will only diminish over time. Soon enough games will need to sell 10 million just to break even.

GAAS may not be the games we play but they can be the safety net that can keep PlayStation Studios well funded into the future

Right now Sony is in the precarious position where a lot of revenue comes from third party GAAS success, where they only make 30% and where COD can be directly attributed to helping fund PlayStation Studios


And all of that is at more and more risk as Microsoft buys up publishers

Just one to two major hits for GAAS will be a game changer. Single player bangers are what we buy the systems for but GAAS will be what keeps the lights on
This argument is saying single player games can’t sustain themselves. I don’t think we’ve seen the evidence for that at all.
 
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Yobo

Yobo

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This argument is saying single player games can’t sustain themselves. I don’t think we’ve seen the evidence for that at all.
It's not that they aren't profitable, it's that the bar for success keeps going up and up

Selling a million on PS2 would make you a monster hit. Now it's nothing.

God of War Ragnarok dev cost was $200 million. That's over 3 million you need to sell at full cost to break even. Maybe more after retailer cuts etc. This would have been unheard of 10 years ago. If a game bombs it is a huge loss

Even if everybody paid the full $70 for Ragnarok and it sold 30 million, it's capping out at $2.1 billion revenue

On the other side Fortnite made $5.8 billion in 2021 and does similar numbers each year

I'm not saying Sony needs Fortnite level success. But if they are successful enough to have a couple GAAS hits generating a few hundred million in profit every year it can essentially keep PS Studios in the green and hopefully the single player studios don't have to even look at GAAS games
 

Johnic

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Agreed. They'd always invest more in these things.

BUT. They need to know their limit. 12 of these games being worked on by multiple PS studios, including those that have a great track record with SP games? Ridiculous.

They're throwing shit at a wall and hoping some of it sticks. It's the COD chasing of the PS3 generation. Everyone wants the next Fortnite. Except only a tiny portion will find just a fraction of its success. But here we are throwing money and developers in hopes of getting a chance of it happening. It's tone deaf.

It's the same thing that saw multiple franchises almost die during the PS3 era by chasing that COD money.
 
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Yobo

Yobo

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Agreed. They'd always invest more in these things.

BUT. They need to know their limit. 12 of these games being worked on by multiple PS studios, including those that have a great track record with SP games? Ridiculous.

They're throwing shit at a wall and hoping some of it sticks. It's the COD chasing of the PS3 generation. Everyone wants the next Fortnite. Except only a tiny portion will find just a fraction of its success. But here we are throwing money and developers in hopes of getting a chance of it happening. It's tone deaf.

It's the same thing that saw multiple franchises almost die during the PS3 era by chasing that COD money.
Pretty sure of those 12, like 5 of them are just new iterations of MLB, plus Destiny expansions
 

Satoru

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It's not that they aren't profitable, it's that the bar for success keeps going up and up

Selling a million on PS2 would make you a monster hit. Now it's nothing.

God of War Ragnarok dev cost was $200 million. That's over 3 million you need to sell at full cost to break even. Maybe more after retailer cuts etc. This would have been unheard of 10 years ago. If a game bombs it is a huge loss

Even if everybody paid the full $70 for Ragnarok and it sold 30 million, it's capping out at $2.1 billion revenue

On the other side Fortnite made $5.8 billion in 2021 and does similar numbers each year

I'm not saying Sony needs Fortnite level success. But if they are successful enough to have a couple GAAS hits generating a few hundred million in profit every year it can essentially keep PS Studios in the green and hopefully the single player studios don't have to even look at GAAS games

So what you're saying is that capitalism is ruining gaming.
 

Killer_Sakoman

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Then they should have bought Rocket League and Fall Guys when they had the chance.

Invested the resources into Naughty Dog when they tried to make Uncharted 4 multiplayer a GaaS instead they didn't allocate the budget and outside Resources to help them even finish their road map.
Then they shouldn't have sold SOE to begin with
 
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FatKaz

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Agreed.

I don't like it. But if you look at the recent slides they released the increase in add on spend really says it all.

It will also help them to have a constant yearly revenue generator, if another big company tries to buy out a competitor who may take away a huge yearly money maker from them.

I guess my worry is how much single player suffers as a result. Jim ryan can give his speeches as much as he wants that it won't, but that showcase was not a good sign.
 
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