The lowest CCU point today had a nice improvement versus the rest of the week. Seems HD2 may get another Steam CCU peak of around aprox. 450K, meaning reaching the 900K CCU limit again unless they increased it (I wouldn't bet on it).
But wouldn't announcing it now negate the bad news cycle currently? Either way I just don't see Sony sitting on 10+ million sold in a month especially when they've only had two 10 million sellers all generation.
Reaction to positive PR right after bad PR is often seen as a way to divert attention from the negative attention by the masses even if this wasn't planned that way. But I personally don't think this is the reason for no milestone announcement.
We might simply have to wait until it breaks that record and/or have to wait until the last quarterly report of the Fiscal Year.
That's usually late April/Early May for Sony IIRC.
Good news are positive but will help them more later when announcing the fiscal year report in May, and most of the bad news weren't their fault:
Last quarter they posted great numbers, including records almost everywhere as usual, even if didn't achieve their PS5 units sales target. Profit wasn't one of them, was lower than expected, mostly due to external things they can't control and that pretty likely will go worse during the mid term.
Things like inflation, gaming market revenue getting flat instead of growing as it has been making during almost every year during its 50 years of history, partly due to the post covid crysis but also because the western financial system has been bubble that is starting to explode. Plus having a war against Russia where USA/NATO blocked the businesses with such huge market, highly damaging the economy of such western (including Japan/Sony) countries and companies. A crysis that can go way worse if USA/NATO later attacks Russia causing a nuclear WWIII, or expanding the war attaching/blocking China with the excuse of Taiwan (the real reason is that USA is losing the worldwide hegemony against the BRICS and don't want to allow a multipolar world). That would fuck things even more.
So as a result, investors move away their investments, not only from Sony or gaming, but in general. And in the particular case of gaming, tech investors see that gaming has been flat during a couple years, not growing anymore as did in the past, so they are moving their investments instead to AI because it's growing a lot.
So gaming companies like Sony, even if posting great numbers, have to overcome all this trying to push their profitability to be more appealing to investors and to save money just in case in the near future things go way worse. Also, have to face the fact that AAA games become way more expensive every generation but the gaming market stoppped its growth, which means they are fucked in the mid/long term if they don't find additional revenue sources and reduce costs.
This means that even if Sony posted great numbers, had to cut some projects, reduce costs where possible like firing a portion of their workforce to cut some fat. In the last 5 years SIE grew to have like maybe 3-4 times the amount of people they had before, and now had to fire around 8% of their workforce.
Sony and many other companies saw this coming. And this is why SIE/Jim Ryan wisely expanded their business to GaaS, PC, movies/tv shows and soon with the next CEO, mobile gaming. Markets that help them reach new users and fans to grow their IPs but more importantly their revenue and profitability.
In the fiscal year report of May, pretty likely they'll update the numbers on these strategies, which already were great (excluding mobile, they still didn't start to releasing their mobile efforts) and Helldivers 2 is going to be a major success in GaaS (after MLB, GT or Destiny) and PC (after being already generating hundreds of millions in profit per year with a huge yearly growth).
Pretty likely the numbers of the report will show that Sony had to do such effort to control their profitability but that their GaaS and PC initiatives are working very well and show promising results both for the future of Helldivers 2 (insane user retention, inverted sales curve during first weeks) and their PC and GaaS initiatives.
Another thing that is affecting their profitability are costs related to recent acquisitions, so investors would prefer to don't make more acquisitions now because they'd put even more related costs on top. They'd prefer to instead wait some time until they already paid the costs of the previous ones and these previous ones start to pay off (as will be releasing the first game of Firewalk and Bungie as Sony companies).
So if Sony wants to announce Arrowhead acquisition now, they'll have to justify it very well with these numbers to the investors, being the Helldivers 2 sales just one of them. So I assume that they may lock the acquisition but won't announce it until next year having released Concord and Marathon and hopefully having improved their profitability and having paid the cost relaated to all previous acquisitions.
GoW:R sold
11 millions in 10 weeks is still the record for a PS title.
That was revealed in their financial earnings report in February 2023 as part of the quartely earnings report ending December 31st 2022, although they gave the data for GoW:R all the way up to mid-January in order to brag about that number.
True, thanks for sharing. I only did a quick search before and found the 15M one but not the 11M one, which definetively is better for the comparision.