Why are Sony doing publishing/possible exclusives as SIE? Didn't they create the PS Studios branding for this, when they work on a game-to-game basis, such as Death Stranding 1?
SIE's and PS Studio's Japan Studio got restructured splitting it into two, separating its 2nd party publishing team (the one who until then published 2nd party Japanese games like Death Stranding) into a new studio that would be the Japan & rest of Asia branch of XDEV, as they did before in EU and USA. As happened previously in these other regions hat new office would report to the global XDEV team instead of to a local internal development team, which is what it did until then.
All internal Japan Studio's game development teams were downsided and merged into one of these teams, Team Asobi, and got rebranded to that name.
This team published after the restructuring published Death Stranding Director's Cut and will publish Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade, Convallaria, Lost Soul Aside and any other 2nd party game developed by an Asian team.
Why dont they just buy the IP's rather than the overall companies, say Konami's, and then give original owners special liscencing rights/fee waving, and say any profits you make off a CastleVania Pachinko machine over here is immaterial to us, we dont run themeparks and merchandising a bomberman plushie, but we want control to leverage the IP over here where it concerns games/media/anime/streaming/backwards compatability etc.
Because Sony already has a shit ton successful IPs that sell like ten times more than the Konami ones. As an example, would be pretty stupid to ask SSM to stop making GoW to make Castlevania instead. Plus Konami is successful -way less than Sony- doing their pachinkos, mobile games and console games so pretty likely don't want to sell their IPs.
I mean hell I'd be happy with making old series entries available on BC, but then co-funding/co-developing a game outright. Like SF5, ya know? The game might never have been made, taken longer to make, or be hamstrung by multiplatform development lower common denominators. Surely something like this would almost be defecto exclusivity in the console space, and better than 6 months time on this, 1 year for that? But the end game in question should benefit from Sony's resources/support extra than what the company could produce on their own. Hopefully that made sense?
Sony paid Capcom to make SFV a full console 3rd party exclusive, and Capcom accepted because needed the money. Now Capcom doesn't need the money and prefered to make SF6 multiplatform, so only accepted to make it console exclusive for the previous gen.
Regarding timed exclusives (not the case of Street Fighter), it's benefitial both for Sony and the dev: for Sony it's cheaper to get a timed exclusive than a full exclusive, so with the same money they get a similar PR/marketing impact by getting temporal exclusives but since they are cheaper can get more exclusives with the same amount of money spent on full exclusives. For the dev it's better a temporal exclusive because later they'll be able to publish it elsewere. Same goes with allowing the team to port it to PC.
Sony is getting more 1st, 2nd and 3rd party exclusives (both AAA and indie) than they ever had, and recently have been investing more than they ever did in all these 4 groups and according to Jim Ryan they expect to have more exclusives for PS5 than they ever had for any previous console.
