You really lack the understanding that nobody is going to feel sorry for Sony. If the finacial health of their corporation held them back from making key investments PlayStation needed it's their problem and they will pay a high price for it.A lot of you guys really lack the understanding required to navigate the context here.
Sony was struggling as a company for much of the 2010s and only largely got back in good standing in the last few years.
Sony owned like 10% of Square Enix and had to sell those shares in 2014 because they weren't doing so hot. So the idea that it was going to invest heavily into studios and publishers is entirely misguided.
FromSoftware was purchased in April 2014, the same month that Sony sold Square Enix shares. Since the time Sony sold their square enix stock, the company has barely grown.
There are only so many games Sony can publish in a year before their games are competing against themselves, especially now when so many games come out. Buying a multitude of studios, and taking on their debt, isn't an easy recipe for success. Right now Sony gets 30% of these company's sales, without putting a dime into their game development and that pie is going to increase now that Xbox is pretty dead as a brand.
Going back to the GTA3 days, Sony wasn't going to buy Rockstar, which would have required buying T2 Interactive, because gaming wasn't nearly as profitable back then and while GTA was a massive property, T2 wasn't worth it back then. They largely became worth it after they were able to parlay their success from GTA into Red Dead and the successful purchase of Visual Concepts.
Sony not buying Visual Concepts, I think was their biggest mistake, but there are good reasons to not have done that either. Their big game at the time was NFL 2K and EA and the NFL had just made a deal for exclusivity. NHL 2K and NBA 2K weren't that big at the time and they already had a studio making baseball games.
You'll notice all of the companies Sony bought in the 2000s, and 2010s were all really minor studios. Insomniac was probably the most expensive studio they purchased when they purchased it up until the Bungie purchase. And these were only made possible by the success of the PS4 and the projected success of the PS5, catapulted by a digital storefront, that they didn't have in the PS2 days, which only came to be with the PS3 as a viable option with the increase in broadband in households and as we know the PS3 underperformed, so the money didn't really start rolling in until the PS4.
Even looking at the Bungie buy, I think Sony was afraid Microsoft would buy Bungie back and revitalize Halo. They had already purchased out the major FPS studios and Sony needed to ensure they had a presence in FPS, so I think they paid a premium for those things. To prevent Microsoft from getting a 2nd lease on life and from entirely cornering the FPS market.
The ROI on these big purchases don't tend to be great, buying a lot of these companies now will eat into your 3rd party royalties, make managing the studios you already have more difficult, and there is no guarantee of continued success.
Capcom for example has already remade their most popular modern-ish RE games. There is no guarantee that RE5 and 6 remakes would sell all that well. I think they have potential to do other franchise, but who knows how well they'll sell.
Square Enix is a bad purchase however you spin it.
FromSoftware is really dependent on one guy... that's billions of dollars invested in 1 guy who could leave anytime he wants.
Atlus wasn't worth buying until Persona 5 or 4 at best and not buying them really isn't a needle mover, but again they were purchased in 2013 when Sony was having problems financially.
SIE unlike Sony Pictures and Sony Music has to invest in hardware R&D and production every cycle. It's not JUST IP with them.
All you do is make excuses for why Sony doesn't need to do anything. Cool, good for them. All they need is to remake games and port games to PC, how exciting.
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