I think they won't hold any stock, storage is a cost specially with a quicly rising inflation in many countries. I think they'll keep producing and shipping asap all the units they can. Which I think in Q2 won't be a lot more than in the previous Q2, but in the case of Q3 I think they'll be able to achieve a huge increase YoY.
Okay, so your expectations for Q2 are in relation to Q2 from FY2021 after all, cool. I initially thought it was in terms of Q1 FY2022 to Q2 FY2022.
I don't recall how many units Sony sold Q2 FY2021 but I'm going to guess it was something like 3 million?
I don't know about that man, did you see what Sony had to say about it recently ? They're legit scared and admit themselves they can't match game pass for a bunch of years.
This isn't any fanboy drivel, this is official communique from Sony.
Sony's just being coy and playing a victim role in this instance. Behind-the-scenes I'm pretty sure they have an understanding of where GamePass revenue is at (what probably really matters for them) and probably realize it's not very high all things considered, probably a reason they revamped PS+ instead by rolling PS Now into it rather than launch yet another subscription service.
Also a caveat here being in Sony's case they would have to justify Day 1 in a sub service with their marquee games retaining the budgets they do, the scope and scale that they provide, etc., which is currently not possible. The numbers simply don't work out. Again just look at GamePass; Halo Infinite supposedly has a $500 million budget (although a lot of that is for future content and marketing, maybe engine revamps too) and yet we still have not gotten GamePass revenue figures.
So for them, it would take a long time, even with big investments, to create something rivaling GamePass in terms of Day 1 1P games into the service, considering the type of marquee 1P games Sony makes and the budgets typically involved with them, and the amount of revenue the service would have to consistently generate to make up for any lost upfront sales (and also cover the typical marketing expenses Sony puts towards said games).
It's a much lower requirement with Microsoft because they don't make a lot of 1P games with budgets like a HFW or GOW, and they don't do a lot of game-specific advertising in traditional spaces either. Not only that, most of the 1P games they make don't really sell huge numbers to begin with, these days. FH5 and Halo Infinite are probably around 2 - 3 million LTD so far at most, each.
I don't think you can extrapolate like that. You also need to compare against the % of digital games sold per region.
Any company would ship fewer digital only consoles to a market that sells fewer digital copies.
So a 7:1 is not as expected as you may think
So globally then would you consider the split is closer to a 5:1, 4:1 or a 3:1?
You hit the first sentence spot on. This is pretty much nothing but underhanded tactics. They're essentially whining about the prospect of losing CoD as a multi platform game while on the other hand making sure games like FFXVI don't go multi platform.
But it's also a bit of a slap to their own studios that they're openly admitting nothing they have can match Call of Duty.
I can't imagine Naughty Dogs, Insomniac etc are pleased hearing comments like that from their corporate HQ.
Again, Sony's just playing coy. Financially speaking, few of their studios have made anything generating COD's revenue, that's just straight-up true. Only Gran Turismo and maybe Spiderman come close. But I don't see how ND, SSM etc. would be offended by that; the same could be said for virtually every other developer in the industry outside of maybe Nintendo, and that's really only due to Pokemon.
In terms of quality, it really comes down to specific things. COD's seen as one of the premier FPS games on the market, hands-down, and it's no secret that historically speaking Sony's teams have struggled to make FPS games the majority consider on the level of COD. The Resistance & Killzone series might have had good entries and visually matched or bettered COD at the time of certain releases but they simply didn't have the draw. Same can be said of MANY other FPS games in the industry though so by that metric they aren't wrong.
In terms of quality when it comes to other metrics, though, it's highly debatable COD is among the top in some of those areas and many of Sony's studios easily surpass them in such areas. But that's not really what they're going by when discussing COD, ABK and this acquisition, so there's no point focusing on that. Sony aren't belittling the talent of their teams or 3P partners, they're just telling it how it is.
There's no other FPS on the market with the brand power or gameplay consistency (that appeals to the masses) as COD, and it'd take a lot of effort & some luck for another FPS to rival or surpass it in those areas let alone become the new dominant FPS on the market. That's the angle Sony are focusing their talking points on, for strategic reasons.
