I actually understand they arent Nintendo and need more money coming from different and new avenues And Gaas is one of them.
True, but remember that Nintendo is also betting on GaaS with their F2P games, mobile games, Smash Bros, Splatoon, Mario Kart etc.
Sony cant survive with just AAA single player games. They’ve been lucky with great hits and some titles like Horizon selling well. A few ok titles like Days Gone and they are on there arse.
True, I agree. But well, Days Gone may not be a good example because it was the most successful game ever made by the studio, got dlc, the pc port and an upcoming movie. And Hermen greenlighted the first pitch Bend sent them after DG, the new IP. Plus it was around 9M unit solds while ago, may be around 10M copies sold now, must be a profitable game.
We can use other examples: maybe games like Returnal, Demon's Souls, Sackboy or Ratched sold around 5M or less. But well, at least they were cheaper developments, I assume more designed to build early exclusives lineup than to get a great profitability, something that would be compensated with extra profit from giant crossgen blockbuster like GoWR, HFW, GT7 or even Morales.
In any case, it's true that they need to find extra revenue sources like going GaaS with some of their games, because some of their bigger games (GaaS or not) may have a total budget of almost $500M and if a couple of them tank in a row it would really hurt them.
Im just hoping they have expanded the other studios like they have done with Insomniac. If thats the case, then Ill be happy. But we have yet to here from a bunch of studios.
See this is perfrect, I hope they have expanded some of the others studios like this. Santa Monca and Naughty dog need it more than Insomniac. They make better games in my opinion too, so Sony should be smart enough to expand these studios. If not its worrying.
Yes, one of the things Jim and Hermen have been doing has been to grow all their PS Studios teams to the point many of them can work now in more games at the same time, as Insomniac did since decades ago.
In addition to this, they also acquired support and porting studios like Valkyrie or Nixxes to make sure they don't have to worry about these tasks.
Plus also now they have less pressure with release dates because also acquired multiple gamedev studios like Bungie, Housemarque, Bluepoint, Firesprite or Firewalk and also increased their bet on 2nd and 3rd party deals.
Let's see how their studios grew:
- SSM should be working on at least the next GoW (set in a new mythology) and Cory's new IP + GoW movie/tv show adaptation.
- Guerrilla recently released CoM and Burning Shores, soon will release the HFW pc port and are working on at least Horizon 3, Horizon Online and the movie/tv show adaptation.
- ND recently released TLOUP1 + the pc ports + Uncharted+TLOU movie/show adaptations and is working on TLOU Online and more games, being a least one of them single player
- San Diego hosted the Sony Visual Arts team who codeveloped (and initially pitched and leaded TLOUP1) in addition to making the MLB games
- Polyphony developed GT7 and GT7 PSVR2 while still releasing GT Sport stuff, so they have at least a second team for post launch stuff
- Their Japanese XDEV team in charge of all their Asian 2nd party games, who previously was inside Japan Studio, grew and now has a gazillion announced 2nd party games (Death Stranding 2, Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade, Convallaria, the India/China Hero Project games etc)
- All the Japan Studio internal development teams were merged into Team Asobi, becoming rebranded and getting a new office where they plan to grow to 100 people. They are now working on a 3d action (platformer?) game with humour bigger than the Astros plus in multiple prototypes and experiments
- Housemarque has been growing to make their next game bigger than Returnal
- Firesprite already had multiple teams, but grew more with AAA hirings and acquired Fabrik, a studio located nearby (with -like Firesprite- former Studio Liverpool and Evolution members) who already supported them in multiple projects
- Bluepoint grew to first work on God of War Ragnarok as support team instead of in remakings/remasters. Their next game pretty likely will continue being a support job, but continue growing getting a strong game design team that would allow after it to maybe lead their own new AAA game.
- London Studio grew and they are now working on their first big AAA game in a ton of years. In the past they had 2 teams, maybe they continue having them but I'd bet they are now merged working in this game.
- Bend already grew a lot during Days Gone development, to make Days Gone their first open world game, and first home console AAA since the PS2, because they were focused on portables during a lot of time.
- Bungie already was growing, but we knew that after the acquisition have been also aggresively hiring. They are working on at least 3 games at the same time: Destiny 2, Marathon, Matter and probably more.
- Firewalk is also growing, as normal part of making their first AAA game.
- Same goes with Haven. They originally pitched 3 games to Sony, and Sony wanted all 3. But they dediced to grow in a slower pace and to start only with 1 game, even if at Ubisoft Toronto and Montreal they were experts on scaling fast and work on a gazillion very successful AAA games at the same time.
- There's only Sucker Punch and Media Molecule as who I don't know if they significally grew in recent years, but at least in the case of Sucker Punch I'd bet they also did it, like the rest of the big teams. I bet that they are working on GoT2 + GoT Legends 2 as a standalone GaaS. Or GoT2 + new IP, or who knows, maybe even GoT2 + GoT Legends 2 + new IP.
And they reinvest a good chunk of their revenue on hirings (and acquisitions of long time partners). This was the 'organic' growth strategy Jim Ryan mentioned..
But the communication for me and many others has been awful. Friends, brother, Gaming friends all agree too.
No, in recent years they communicated more and better than ever, and they announced and marketed a shit ton of games. They have many streamed events/conferences per year (State of Play, Showcase etc) plus they from time to time are in different events like Game Awards/Summer Games Fest/CES, and they often announce via PS Blog + youtube + social media. They got record numbers on social media.
What they no longer do is to announce games to be released 4 or more years in the future, they focus on marketing games to be released in the next months, maximum they announce games planned to be released in around a year and a half.
And now big announcements aren't focused in the E3 State of Play/Showcase, they spread the big announcements across the year.
