Hypothetical: ABK is approved, what should Sony's next few moves be?
- Thread starter Bryank75
- Start date
They have to buy start buying publishers like EA or Take TWO. They don't have any major FPS or RPG. EA can fill FPS and RPG gap that is lacking in PS studios. If this goes through that means others can also buy publishers because they can aruge things like "we also want to compete with MS and SONY and the only we can do that is by buying studios." SONY doesn't really have a choice here. Either go on major shopping spree or lose your major partners. No middle ground whatsoever here.
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I think that was the main goal of the Bungie buyout: to have them as a bargaining chip.
Me too, but like the regulators I think that unless by acquiring someone you'd create a monopoly or almost (to gain enough market power to be able to perform monopolistic actions) they are free to acquire independently if they are clear market leaders -like Sony- or if they are far from being market leader -like MS-.
After the acquisition MS will have a market share in the low tens, like Tencent or Sony. And regarding consoles specifically, Sony will continue having over twice the market share, install base, active userbase and subscribers.
CoD sells a lot and some of the other studios they bought sold a lot over a decade ago, but they are a tiny portion of the whole console (or PC, or mobile) market. MS and ABK were some of the main console + PC publishers and will continue being one of them, won't change a lot in the rankings and their marketshare won't change a lot in that market.
Where MS will see a bigger change with the acquisition will be in mobile because now joining King they'll become one of the top pubilshers in mobile, but still having a tiny mobile gaming market share.
The gaming market is so huge, there's a huge amount of games and niches out there, and there are many major publishers out there with a small or tiny market share each. A handful big acquisitions won't make any meaningful change.
Gamers get the consoles that have the games they want to play. Only a tiny portion of them would switch to other console because 1 game is now only available somewhere. Outside Nintendo (where people mostly have the console as secondary platform to play mostly only there Nintendo games), people mostly play multiplatform games, meaning that exclusives are mostly accesory for them.
And in the case of CoD pretty likely will continue multiplatform forever. Not only because regulators would ask for it, but because it is what it makes sense for MS. So PS CoD players will continue playing CoD in PS and if it ever goes exclusive, it would happen once Sony will have many first party shooters there made by the makers or Destiny, CoD and the good Halo games (Bungie, Firewalk, Deviation, etc) so maybe even would happen once CoD's relevancy would be way lower than now.
Also, if MS decides to remove CoD from PS, Sony could also decide to remove Bungie games from Xbox. Or even to don't allow MS to publish games on PS, something that would heavily hurt the MS game division.
The CMA has shown that this is not the case and that a pretty sizeable portion of gamers would in fact switch to another console if CoD was made first-party.
No, the CMA haven't said that.
They only did a poll among PS CoD users from UK, who are only a small portion of the PS CoD players, who are around 10% or less of the PS active userbase and even a smaller portion of the total PS userbase.
And out of that tiny portion of the total PS userbase that are the PS CoD players from UK, only 16% said that they would leave PS if CoD goes console exclusive. And this is what they said in a poll I'd bet that the number would be even lower. I highly doubt that the PS total userbase (not only active, not only CoD, not only from UK) would decrease more than a total of 1-2%. A percentage smaller than Sony's multi year growth (specially when not blocked by shipment shortages).
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The poll has enough responses so that it can be extrapolated to their whole pool of clients, at the very least in the UK. 16% of a few million consoles is still a pretty substantial amount.
The poll only is representative of the CoD PS UK players. Not all PS UK players, not all the CoD PS global players and even less all PS players around the world.
Let's assume it's representative of all CoD PS players around the world: if a CoD sells 20-30M, and around half of that is on PS (10-15M), a 16% of that would be 1.6M-2.4M. So if CoD goes exclusive and these 16% of the CoD users really leave, PS would lose around 2M users. Not only in UK, in the whole world.
Until now the install bases of PS4 and PS5 are >117M and >32M. Combined they had 112M MAU in December. Sony said that half of the PS5 users are new, they don't come from PS4. Meaning, they'd need to sell around 4M PS5s to compensate these 2M users lost.
So it would take what, a quarter or two for Sony to compensate these 2M users lost? This is nothing for them.
So simultaneously you try to discredit the poll as only applying to the UK market, but then somehow extrapolate that to the whole world?
Also, let's get some things straight because I was operating under the basis that your arguments are accurate (which they kinda are but not paint anything close to the full picture)
First, their official documentation does not state that the survey was exclusive to the UK market (however I don't doubt that it was, it makes sense).
Second, two figures are provided: 24% and 16%, each with their own context. In the context of their survey, 24% of CoD players said they would move away from Playstation if the game was not available on the platform:
Whereas 16% said they would move out of Sony's ecosystem if there was partial foreclosure (like having Xbox-only exclusives)
You are also conveniently ignoring other answers from the same survey that provide a much bigger scope to how content influences platform acquisition:
To add things up, you have the potential of up to 24% of CoD buyers moving to another ecosystem ultimately, and up to 73% of new / repeat buyers not acquiring the console at all in the future. Not only CoD impacts platform permanence, but also platform choice.
Edit - If we extrapolate this data globally and take at face value that ~30 to 40% of CoD sales are on PS consoles, you're talking close to 10M (if not more) users moving to a new ecosystem for one game alone, let alone all the other IP ABK (and Bethesda) own.
If ABK deal is approved I forsee a lot of the internet to look at MS in a different light to be honest. And not in a good way. Even though they are trying to make Playstation to be the bad guy with all this exclusivity deal document stuff.
I think relationships with Sony from Capcom, Square, From, and the likes get tighter. I think depending on sub numbers for using to flex for deals. You will not see Monster hunter series come day to date. And if not come later on gamepass.
They will want a good amount of money since Xbox is not selling in Japan.
As the year goes on and we get closer to 3 giant Japanese releases, that window is going to get smaller.
I think relationships with Sony from Capcom, Square, From, and the likes get tighter. I think depending on sub numbers for using to flex for deals. You will not see Monster hunter series come day to date. And if not come later on gamepass.
They will want a good amount of money since Xbox is not selling in Japan.
As the year goes on and we get closer to 3 giant Japanese releases, that window is going to get smaller.
Nothing. Sony will get close to other publishers, and since Sony sells the proper amount of hardware, they always get the goods.
No, I don't discredit the poll. It was a poll to get the opinion of CoD PS players from UK and I assume that if well done is representative of that group.
What I discredited is your 'The CMA has shown that this is not the case and that a pretty sizeable portion of gamers would in fact switch to another console if CoD was made first-party.' and '16% of a few million consoles is still a pretty substantial amount.' quotes.
The CMA is the market regulator of UK, so they analyze and protect the impact on the UK users. I doubt they'd ask the players from other countries.
Notice the difference:
"The survey asked what they would have done if the most recent CoD game they owned at that time had not been available on PlayStation, but had been available on Xbox and PC. Results indicated that 24% of respondents would have bought an Xbox, a PC, or no gaming device at all instead of a PlayStation."
"Results indicated 16% of our survey respondents, ie [redacted]% of UK PlayStation users move away from PlayStation in the event of a specific type of partial foreclosure strategy (ie content exclusivity)."
This means the 24% is CoD UK PS players wouldn't have bought the console, but now that they bought when asking if they'd leave PS the percent goes down to 16%. Meaning 84% of the CoD UK PS players wouldn't leave PS if it goes exclusive.
I made an estimation of around half of the 20-30M (let's say 25M) sales of the CoD games being on PS (10-15M, let's say 12.5M). A 16% of that would mean around 2M users.
If instead of 50% we consider that PS gets 30-40% (let's say 35%) of these 25M (8.75M) then a 16% of that would be 1.4M and 24% would be 2.1M.
The rest of the 112M PS MAU/even higher total PS userbase are people who don't buy CoD or that they bought CoD but wouldn't leave PS if goes exclusive. Or that they bought CoD on PS and would have bought PS even if the CoD they bought would have been Xbox console exclusive.
So again, if CoD goes console exclusive PS would only lose around a couple million users, or even less. And that would be assuming that this poll would have accurate results that could be extrapolated to the global market.
The PS4/PS5 sales of the other ABK and Bethesda IPs are even way more irrelevant for PS than CoD. Being very generous let's say that instead 2M PS would lose 4M. PlayStation would still recover these users in a quarter or two. Remember that before Sony merged the PS4+PS5 reports of software units sold -as I remember that happened with the PS5 launch- they had sold around 1.6 or 1.7 Billion games for PS4, which should be way more now. And PS5 is selling more games on average than PS4.
CoD sells a lot, but it's a small portion of the games sold in PS. And the other ABK and Bethesda games represent an even smaller percentage.
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Sony does not need to do anything to keep me. But many gamers love COD and Diablo.
Knowing that Sony can't keep up with Microsoft and aquisitions, they then will have no choice but to refocus their business on people like me, which is good for me.
Knowing that Sony can't keep up with Microsoft and aquisitions, they then will have no choice but to refocus their business on people like me, which is good for me.
But you didn't?
I can tell the difference, since you brought incomplete numbers and I brought the correct ones, as well was their source.
Take the L for once, you're wrong, move on.
Nope, they bought bungie so they would help them on their live service games as well as destiny serving as a money printer for them. They can't really even use destiny as a bargaining chip since its been already on xbox and sony is not going to bother with taking away a game that's already released. They would rather have it generate money for them. If they bought take 2 on the other hand, I can see them use gta6 as a bargaining chip since its unannounced.
As I've said previously, get Square Enix Japan portion or get Capcom. But honestly, I don't think they really need to do anything simply because I think they are doing well the way they are now. Bungie was a huge get for them. I am looking forward too seeing the GaaS titles.
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peter42O
Guest
If COD was exclusive to Xbox/PC, some consumers would obviously jump to Xbox/PC but the percentage isn't substantial enough to where it's going to do anything and so many people worry about Sony losing market share which is actually a good thing because it would make them compete harder for your money but realistically, that percentage is 5% give or take so with 70% world wide market share, dropping to 65% (hell, even 60%) isn't to change much if anything for Sony and PlayStation. They'll be number one and dominant. As an Xbox fan, their console will never surpass PlayStation regardless of what they do because that's not their business model. Their model is to get consumers into the platform and eco-system. It doesn't matter if it's via console, PC, streaming, etc.
Of course, since COD will be staying on PlayStation, while some consumers may buy an Xbox to play COD via Game Pass and perhaps other games, their primary gaming console will still be PlayStation. The vast majority of COD players aren't going to jump ship just because it's on Game Pass because chances are, they have their group of friends that they play with and to jump, all of them would have to jump and that's just not happening.
Of course, since COD will be staying on PlayStation, while some consumers may buy an Xbox to play COD via Game Pass and perhaps other games, their primary gaming console will still be PlayStation. The vast majority of COD players aren't going to jump ship just because it's on Game Pass because chances are, they have their group of friends that they play with and to jump, all of them would have to jump and that's just not happening.
The only reason to lock down more studios is simply for the arms race that has been instigated. It allows Sony/Ms to work out deals for games to each others platforms that may not if assimilated. E.g. Starfield for next RE game etc.
Edit: although porting to Xbox without going straight to gamepass may be more trouble than it’s worth if it can’t sell there
. Xbox wouldn’t have that problem the other way around.
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