Shawn layden interview When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel.

Cool hand luke

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Very interesting interview. Echoes what I have been saying for a long time. Console gaming peaked in the 7th generation in terms of units and you can only make up nickel and dining existing users for a while. They have no choice but to reach more platforms if they want to show immediate growth to the shareholders.
Where do you propose they do that? PC ain't it. It's an even smaller and stagnant/dying platform.

 
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Thunderstorm__

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Very interesting interview. Echoes what I have been saying for a long time. Console gaming peaked in the 7th generation in terms of units and you can only make up nickel and dining existing users for a while. They have no choice but to reach more platforms if they want to show immediate growth to the shareholders.
The shareholders are dumbfuck who only care about profits. If you show them good profits, they go hooray, they do not know how to run a business. Opportunity cost is a thing, you can not maximize profits from both platforms when you are a platform holder yourself, it's just nonsense. And it begs another question of why not release the games on Xbox also if you are trying to earn every penny to cover the development costs? These execs are too fucking greedy, they will learn their hard lesson when they try to do day-and-date ports and the console suddenly plummets.
 

Thunderstorm__

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And what will they show to the shareholders, once they start losing people from their ecosystem?
The billions they earn from their ecosystem are what enable them to cover the development costs of many of their exclusives. And those exclusives lure more people into their ecosystem, which in turn makes the ecosystem earn more. They do not seem to understand 10 million copies sold is not even as profitable as 2 million gamers actively using your ecosystem.
 

Dr Bass

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Cool hand luke

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Which numbers are you looking at? PC players dwarfs console players.

Literally the numbers in the thread I linked which demonstrate PC software sales making up 10-20% of major multiplatform releases. More players? Great. I'm sure they're having a blast on minesweeper and solitaire.

Pointing to 1.x billion PC players could not be more dishonest. What can you sell to 99% of those players? It's not AAA graphics-intensive experiences.
 

JAHGamer

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Which numbers are you looking at? PC players dwarfs console players.

Overall, yes, because of places like Asia where PC is much bigger than consoles. But we're specifically talking about the AAA market, PC isn't there yet compared to PS, especially not when it comes to $70 releases. PC is big for crap like League of Legends, Valorant, CSGO, Dota, etc. But actual AAA game sales don't come remotely close to PS5, so @Cool hand luke is correct. It's why releasing on PC day 1 isn't a priority for Rockstar and they're releasing the biggest game ever. They wait to buy games when they're cheaper.
 

Dr Bass

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Gaming revenue by platforms in 2023. Console more than PC by 8%.
Yep, this is true, and like I mentioned above there are still way more PC players than console. It's not a "smaller" or "dying" platform as was suggested.

People can have their preferences and their biases, but as soon as you start being less than truthful about reality to try and make it mold to those biases, you're no longer discussing, you're doing something else. That's the point I'm trying to make. I don't even like PC gaming, I don't own a Windows PC, and have no plans to. But I know what their position in the market place is. I also think the audiences for console and PC games are quite different, and this also seems to be proven by the data.
 
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Thunderstorm__

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Yep, this is true, and like I mentioned above there are still way more PC players than console. It's not a "smaller" or "dying" platform as was suggested.

People can have their preferences and their biases, but as soon as you start being less than truthful about reality to try and make it mold to those biases, you're no longer discussing, you're doing something else. That's the point I'm trying to make. I don't even like PC gaming, I don't own a Windows PC, and have no plans to. But I know what their position in the market place is. I also think the audiences for console and PC games are quite different, and this also seems to be proven by the data.
PC is definitely not dying, I think those are just remarks to shame on a certain PC-favored discourse about how the platform is such a fast-growing platform. I like the truth too, and the PC guys to me are a bunch of hypocrites that I really hate, despite gaming on PC for the last few years.
 

Dr Bass

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Literally the numbers in the thread I linked which demonstrate PC software sales making up 10-20% of major multiplatform releases. More players? Great. I'm sure they're having a blast on minesweeper and solitaire.

Pointing to 1.x billion PC players could not be more dishonest. What can you sell to 99% of those players? It's not AAA graphics-intensive experiences.
Pointing to market statistics and numbers could not be more dishonest? What are you, 12 years old?

They are very different markets and they generate close to the same revenue. Which one is more profitable? I would guess PC (though I don't know) given Nintendo makes less revenue than Sony but much more profit. And Xbox makes a good amount of revenue but appears to not be profitable at all. Revenue is hardly the only, or best, metric to measure the health of a market.

Also, what would you rather have given almost equal revenue, more customers or less? This is a pretty easy answer, but think of the ramifications around these numbers.

Again I am a console only player. But it gets old seeing people essentially make straw men arguments to prop up their favorite stuff. It's just dumb.
 
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Dr Bass

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PC is definitely not dying, I think those are just remarks to shame on a certain PC-favored discourse about how the platform is such a fast-growing platform. I like the truth too, and the PC guys to me are a bunch of hypocrites that I really hate, despite gaming on PC for the last few years.
This is a separate topic but the entire culture around PC gaming is one of the reasons I don't feel like going anywhere near it. You see it on this very board ...
 

Thunderstorm__

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Pointing to market statistics and numbers could not be more dishonest? What are you, 12 years old?

They are very different markets and they generate close to the same revenue. Which one is more profitable? I would guess PC (though I don't know) given Nintendo makes less revenue than Sony but much more profit. And Xbox makes a good amount of revenue but appears to not be profitable at all. Revenue is hardly the only, or best, metric to measure the health of a market.

Also, what would you rather have given almost equal revenue, more customers or less? This is a pretty easy answer, but think of the ramifications around these numbers.

Again I am a console only player. But it gets old seeing people essentially make straw men arguments to prop up their favorite stuff. It's just dumb.
Revenue is always positioned at the top of a financial report though. It is best used to measure growth (which basically tells you that the console market is growing, contrary to the belief of some PC fanboys). while profit just tells you about the operation efficiency (Sony has been expanding over the last few years so it is understandable that they do not have high margin profit).
 

Gods&Monsters

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I had a reply before the thread was merged so it disappeared 😔

Sony exclusives regularly outsell big multiplats. Suicide Squad was multiplatform. How did it help? Avatar? Prince of Persia? Skulls and Bones? Immortals of Aveum? Wild Hearts? Spider-Man sold more than all the Batman games together.

Most games don't reach Sony exclusives so this narrative makes no sense. EA, Ubisoft and WB would kill for those sales and yet nobody is worried about them.

I am so tired of this campaign against exclusives started by Microsoft. It's like this is a Phil Spencer interview.
 

Cool hand luke

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More numbers.

Also the source on console sales in this article is vgchartz - those numbers are literally made up.

Here are some real numbers from the UK:

Most popular gaming devices:
Consoles (handheld and home): 38.3%
Static home consoles (growing): 25.8%
PC/Laptops: (shrinking): 21.8

Revenue:
Digital PC: 237m
Digital consoles: 723m
Physical consoles: 488m
Physical PC: 6m


Digital game market by segment:

Full game, subs, DLC (console): 51%
PC full game: 6%

Top 20 digital PC sales: ~1.8m
EA sports FC console digital sales: 1.55m

It's not a contest. The console market is colossal and the PC market is minuscule. I don't want to see a single steam creamer talk about CCUs or how much money is on the table on what is effectively a dead platform that's dwarfed by consoles, namely Switch and PS5. 130m MAUs? 30m CCUs? Sounds CCuseless when you can't muster up anywhere near the revenue or profits.
 
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Very interesting interview. Echoes what I have been saying for a long time. Console gaming peaked in the 7th generation in terms of units and you can only make up nickel and dining existing users for a while. They have no choice but to reach more platforms if they want to show immediate growth to the shareholders.

Maybe if certain platform holders got more creative with their offerings on their console in terms of features and software variety exclusivity to better compete with other gaming devices that aren't necessarily consoles, they'd actually be able to grow their install base.

And if all the platform holders did similar moves (or at least the two that seem more in need to do it; Nintendo seems the exception), the total addressable console market size would grow. I mean we saw that happen in the 7th gen, because all three platform holders were hungry and wanted to maximize their respective console offerings.

This gen? It's mostly been more of the same as before, complete complacency from one (Microsoft) and creeping complacency from another (Sony), when it comes to fully maximizing the offering of their consoles. It's like a restaurant chain getting lazy in their service and recipes and then complains the entire restaurant industry is in decline. No, maybe it's just your restaurant because you need to innovate with your restaurant, not think you can just put your stuff in other restaurants and suddenly reverse fortunes.

These companies have to take accountability for their own situations and stop acting like the market itself is the problem.
 

Thunderstorm__

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Maybe if certain platform holders got more creative with their offerings on their console in terms of features and software variety exclusivity to better compete with other gaming devices that aren't necessarily consoles, they'd actually be able to grow their install base.

And if all the platform holders did similar moves (or at least the two that seem more in need to do it; Nintendo seems the exception), the total addressable console market size would grow. I mean we saw that happen in the 7th gen, because all three platform holders were hungry and wanted to maximize their respective console offerings.

This gen? It's mostly been more of the same as before, complete complacency from one (Microsoft) and creeping complacency from another (Sony), when it comes to fully maximizing the offering of their consoles. It's like a restaurant chain getting lazy in their service and recipes and then complains the entire restaurant industry is in decline. No, maybe it's just your restaurant because you need to innovate with your restaurant, not think you can just put your stuff in other restaurants and suddenly reverse fortunes.

These companies have to take accountability for their own situations and stop acting like the market itself is the problem.
To say the console market did not grow just by looking at the total number of users is stupid. Revenue has been higher than ever, even with a loser like Xbox. Sony could have expanded their ecosystem further by buying some more studios and delivering even more exclusives (compared to the last generation) but they instead focus on PC porting old games while leaving their fucking actual dedicated fans with nothing to eat. It is not acceptable, and they complain about how they are not selling enough PS5. Where are the games.