But what did they do to elevate PS Studios?
They hired a lot of talent for all their studios highly growing most of them to allow them make more games at the same time. Acquired more super talented dev teams plus support teams that handle some of ther less cool work. Talent that not only gives them extra games, but knowledge and expertise that helps their other teams to improve.
They are also expanding their market in Asia, PC, movies and tv shows, MP, shooters and GaaS (plus in the mid term mobile) to grow their revenue, fanbase, brand awareness and profitability in areas where most of the gaming money and players are and where they still didn't have big presence.
As a result, they have been selling more than ever, making more money than ever, getting more reviews than ever and earning more awards than ever.
They made Nintendo to almost totally leave the home consoles to focus on portables and even made MS bend the knee to go full multiplatform on consoles and pretty likely leave soon the console hardware business (at least manufactured by them, they can keep tthe Xbox label as some sort of MS Steam machines).
VR is not selling, great product but it isnt doing enough to sell PS5 and they are not making money on them either...so it's busy work and the game likely made no money or lost.
The whole VR market keeps growing every year faster than the whole gaming market so it has a promising future. But VR is an industry still in its early adopter stages, still isn't in the point where it goes mainstream so it isn't realistic to sell a ton with a high end device.
But considering that, PSVR has almost the totality of the non standalone (high end horsepower, plugged to PS or PC) VR market. And when also counting the standalone (low end horsepower, they are basically an Android phone) Sony has around a third of the market, with Meta as a clear leader losing many billions because sell their devices at a huge loss.
Sony is happy with PSVR2, which is performing better than PSVR1. Which is what they were aiming for. Their goal with PSVR1 & 2 was to help start building the VR market, taking a leading position, expertise, catalog and userbase to be well positioned once it goes mainstream in the future (this doesn't mean it will replace 2D gaming).
PC ports make PS studio game more accessible and therefore less special, less desired and the only reason to havefirst party studios is either to make large profits or to attract people to the PS5.... Nixxes and Firesprite both do not meet these criteria and should be shut down or repurposed
As you know, AAA games are getting too expensive so need more revenue sources to continue being profitable. Even if first party games are selling better than ever in console, need more users and revenue.
That would mean price increases, more GaaS/DLC/MTX, eat console market share (done all three) and to go find more players elsewhere (movies, Asia, PC, mobile) because the console market has the same userbase size since decades ago so the growth is very limited here.
As we see reported by "other software", SIE is making hundreds of millions outside PS per year, and each port only costs them a handful millions and Nixxes made several of them, so they are doing a very successful and profitable job.
Regarding Firesprite, so far they did a good job with Horizon CoM, with the very difficult task of relivering a VR adaptation of a AAA brand raising the bar in VR visuals and PSVR usage to set a new bar from 1st party showcasing PSVR2 possibilities to the other devs. I has been one of the most successful PSVR2 games, but inside the long term bet context I mentioned before.
Sony need to cut costs badly and need to look at the necessity and effectiveness of each studio, as well as their efficiency after that.
There are studios in Korea, Japan, Finland and other lower cost locations making games that are more fun and a comparable level of quality to Insomniac and ND for a fraction of the cost.... that could be fully exclusive.
They need to cut costs, but pretty likely with this 8% layoff will be enough. We have to consider that SIE and this layoff isn't only game dev studios.
SIE has many regional or country specific subsidiaries whose work is mostly related to local marketing, local PR, local CM, local physical sales to retailers, localization and testing. I assume an important part of such layoff will be made there, because it has been the case in many recent layoffs of big game publishers because a lof of the work from these subsidiaries isn't as important as it was in the pre internet era, and in many of them they have many people with great salaries doing mostly nothing productive or profitable, specially when they do in recent years mostly global marketing and PR campaigns.
It has been the case of many of these kind of offices in Spain for other publishers, where they saw cuts or have been shut down in recent few years. The PS Spain offices makes some crazy local marketing things spending a shit ton of money, which I assume will be reduced.
3rd party timed exclusives also do the same as these first party timed exclusives but cost a fraction of first party...so why continue having a first party at all if they are not fully exclusive?
Some of these 1st and 3rd party exclusives will be forever exclusive. While others aren't, timed exclusives still have the marketing impact still have a big impact because gaming is very focused on the most recent/new big thing.
Meaning, things like Final Fantasy VII Remake/Rebirth or in the indies side stuff like Stray, Sifu or Kena get the attention when they are first announced and released making people wanting to play them where they are. Some time later, if released elsewhere they aren't the new great thing so their impact in other platforms isn't the same. Also, these devs also need to release their games in as much possible platforms as they can because they need to have a profitable business.
Same applies for 1st party in PC: they need that extra revenue for profitability. And every year there are more PS exclusives released than PC ports of former exclusives published which means that every year the number of PS exclusive games increases even if they port some of their 1st party games.
They need more revenue to ensure more growth and profits. Because if not you see what happens: having to reduce costs, which partly means people fired, games cancelled or maybe studios shut down.
Porting actually increased costs.... requires more developers and more oversight and more patches and support over the longterm. Cut it all.
Lean. They need to be lean and completely focused on the console and maximizing sales and profits.
We saw PC ports of even lower selling games like Rift Apart were very profitable. And they cost only a couple million each so are a very low risk, plus help to grow their userbase, fanbase and brand.
That means they'll continue pushing PC ports because they need less risk and more profitability and PC ports give them exactly that for a very low cost.
Console components and shipping costs keep increasing killing the profits they normally had in the 2nd half of a console lifecycle from hardware. AAA games are getting too expensive and their cost will continue growing, a few big games flopping would really hurt them.
Even if they are improving in console hardware and 1st party sales and achieving record numbers, they need more revenue and profit than the one console gives them, not less. Leaving the off console money, which is their main opportnity, on the table would cause more layoffs, game cancellations and studio closures.
