Yurinka: SIE needs to increase their profitability using the money from PC ports & Destiny 2
SIE's current CEO is the one who said they have to improve their profitability and that will party address it with PC, I'm just quoting him.
We saw some sales and budget numbers both from PC ports and new games, many of them in the leaked Insomniac docs. We saw there that their next big AAA games are getting budgets of $300-400M range, while PC ports had a budgets of a couple millions and that they were generating dozens of million of dollars.
Reality: Total PC profits from ports & Destiny 2 in FY likely barely $50 million
This is flatearthical gaming stuff, you know this isn't compatible with Sony's fiscal reports.
Also Yurinka: The revenue from PC ports & Destiny 2 can fund multiple AAA games
Yes, this is what factual data shared by Sony publicly shared by Sony or leaked from Insomniac says.
Reality: Single modern AAA game = $300 million. PC revenue = $250 million. PC revenue minus Valve cut = $175 - $200 million
Wrong.
Sony's PC revenue is what Sony receives from Steam/Epic/etc, so after having removed from there their platform holder cut. Meaning, Sony only reports as revenue their "70%" publisher cut. It's something it can be double checked by calculating the revenue per copy that Sony show in the same slide from a recent release that still wasn't discounted ($15.5M/368K = $42.12, which is 70.21% of the price it had then, $59.99.
That $250M data for FY22 didn't include the Destiny 2 PC sales made during FY22 before the acquisition. When adding Bungie for the whole FY22 and also add 1st party revenue from other consoles (they don't report PC only revenue in their quarterly reports, only did it in full FY reports), they did as "other software" 67.73B yen/$438M for FY22, and for the first 3 quarters of FY23 alredy did 50.90B yen/$323.96M (more than in these 3 quarters of the previous year):
Sony estimated $450M for FY23 from PC, and looking at what they reported as non-PS 1st party games revenue for the first 3 quarters of the FY plus what Helldivers 2 seems to have sold in PC, pretty likely they earn more than .
How's SIE going to increase their profit margins if they spend their profits in funding the game
@Yurinka ?
They are working to improve their profit margins with different measures:
- Enlarging the revenue and profit they get from each game by growing in console, PC, mobile and cinema/tv show adaptations, growing in new markets -particularly in some of the top grossing or fastest growing markets where console isn't big enough like China, Korea, India or South America- that offer them bigger revenue and ROI per game/IP (part of it being late PC ports)
- By releasing more GaaS because the successful ones produce way more revenue and ROI than the successful non-GaaS AAAs
- By completing the payments related to relatively recent previous acquisitions (which should ease out in FY24)
- By temporally to stop making new aquisitions to don't increase the related costs
- By firing almost 10% of their workforce, cutting the fat after having increased a ton their workforce in the last 5 years
- Shutting down a couple of less performing and promising teams (Pixel Opus and London)
- Cancellling a few games that they considered didn't have enough potential or that their devs prefered to work in something else
- When partnering with 2nd/3rd party teams, increasing the portion of them in emerging countries with lower salaries, which means lower budgets for games or money to pay for the deals (China, India, etc)
- During the last 5 years they have been growing their manpower in existing teams and making acquisitions of new ones, plus made record investments in 2nd and 3rd party. Which results on a record number of games in the works. Record number of games means pretty likely record number of revenue and profit from them, but we still haven't seen the revenue and profit coming from many of these games because AAA games take around 5-9 years to be made
- To find out some way to address the hardware component costs (+ shipments of physical stuff costs) increment over time caused due to huge inflation -increased even more by covid-, huge production increase for other things that also use them (AI, electric cars...), economic war against the BRICS, etc. They haven't announced new measures for this specific point, but I assume they could do stuff like searching additional providers to reduce cost, to move part of the production or manufacturing to cheaper countries, or closer to where sold to reduce shipment costs, to try to sell a bigger portion of physical stuff on their own stores to reduce the cut sent to retailers and distributors, or something like that.
Where are they getting the other $100 million from,
@Yurinka ?
Why'd they need to pull $100 million from elsewhere if the PC revenue could cover the costs on its own
@Yurinka ?
This is $100M a fictional number out of your ass.
From the Sony reports I posted above we know PC ports of old games + Destiny 2 & MLB outside PS generated to Sony $438M in FY22 and were generating more than that in FY23 (we still don't know the quantity in FY23).
