Sony forecasted 18 million units for the fiscal year
- Thread starter mibu no ookami
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There's no point in making very expensive games for small margins and PlayStation games are the most expensive in the industry excluding something like GTA6
Without a strong hardware platform, they might as well close shop.
Console is where they make all their profits from the PSN store and the PSN store is irrelevant outside console.
Parents and adults buy all the hardware and a PlayStation can offer more value to a family than a Nintendo console, since PlayStation caters better to a variety of age groups.... Imo.
The only issue for PlayStation is terrible management.
You underestimate PlayStation. They understand the medium far better than you or I.
The plastic box isn't going away. There's just more of them that can't be denied.
The plastic box (PlayStation 6, 7 etc) is losing it's luster. More gamers are just playing on old hardware, tablets, phone, PC, streaming etc...
PlayStation knows what they're doing.
Go look at the top 20 largest videogame companies on earth. Notice how most of them don't have "a strong hardware platform". Also notice how many of the companies on that list were miniscule 20 years ago while PlayStation wasn't. Games are the future of this medium.
Sony is the biggest in gaming
Go look at the top 20 largest videogame companies on earth. Notice how most of them don't have "a strong hardware platform". Also notice how many of the companies on that list were miniscule 20 years ago while PlayStation wasn't. Games are the future of this medium.
Tencent is a government backed behemoth with loads of cheap capital.
Nintendo has hardware.
Microsoft has hardware.
Ubisoft would have been considered one of the biggest in the industry... All it takes is a few stinkers or poor company direction and the whole shop goes down.
For instance the whole GAAS initiative was money driven, not creative or opportunity driven.... They didn't see a niche, they followed a trend too late.
The massive costs of game development have made all of these risks far more dangerous too.
You scanned the list of the top 20 largest videogame companies on earth and cherry picked a small number of examples to obfuscate the clear overall trend? Really? Why do this?
Another thing that you're missing is that PlayStation, Microsoft, and Nintendo had very clear head starts over their software competitiors. They were the only kids on the block back in the 90s and 00s. That head start has dwindled significantly over the last 10 years.
PlayStation has to think 10 years ahead. Gamers don't. That's why PlayStation knows what it's doing.
If you think GAAS is going away, I have a bridge to sell you.
I absolutely do not think GAAS is going away and never said that, I just think the approach it was taken from was severely flawed.
Slowly making a hero shooter like Overwatch just because it was successful in 2015 is silly.... Even worse since Overwatch has a captive audience and you'd be going up head to head against that.
Announcing 12 live service games was a terrible idea, it set them up to fail. It signaled to the core PlayStation gamers that they were no longer a priority and that the money PlayStation had earned from them was now going to fund games they had no interest or limited interest in.
From soft have been making the same type of games for a while now and only with Elden Ring did they really pop off.... There is a lot to be said for putting creativity, vision and an artist led approach first rather than an investor led vision (chase).
An artist doesn't look at the market and say... "Oh yeah, landscapes with mountains are making a lot of money lately, I'll paint 12 of those and I'll rake it in" even though they spent the last 10 years training to do still life or portraits... And that's where their skills lay.
It's just bewildering.
The 12 Live Service games announcement will only be proven a failure if PlayStation doesn't reach their profit / revenue goals. This was always a long term strategy. We'll know how successful it was sometime around 2030.
This is a fact of life... When you're learning something new, you can expect a higher rate of failure. PlayStation funding 15 Live Service seeds shows that they're in tune with todays gamer and understands the direction the medium is going.
The old single player gamer simply wasn't a large enough audience to continue catering to.
Open world. The market craves high quality open world games. The suits and strategists know this. That's why Bloodborne died on the vine and Elden Ring delivered a new era of success for From Soft.
An artist doesn't make AAA single player games either. Your artistic vision gets diluted and corrupted the more teams you have to cater too. A 150 person studio making Uncharted 4 isn't the Vincent Vango Starry Night you think it is.
It's so interesting to see people think strategy and market trends only started with GAAS. As if all the expensive AAA single player games from 2000 - 2018 weren't guided by strategists and suits.
Bewildering indeed.
The point was that announcing 12 GAAS like that was for a short term stock bump. They should have just said the had a GAAS plan and let each game speak for itself...
There will always be a marker for AAA single player games with a well crafted narrative... We never have enough of them and some niches are completely ignored and could be a goldmine.
That's where humint comes in and why I am so happy about it.
Death Stranding 2... Much needed but won't sell 20 million. It will still do well.
You can tell, project by project, which ones have strong artistic vision. It resonates with people more often.
You care more about what they said. A strategist cares more about what they did. The phrasing and the coddling of feelings is irrelevant.
This is wrong. The AAA single player market is shrinking. Fewer and fewer AAA single player, narrative focused games are succeeding in todays market with only a small number of Cyberpunk 2077 and Spiderman level games chewing up a larger and larger piece of the pie.
The reason why these games are shrinking is because they neglect the core strength of the videogame medium. Player interactivity. That's what GAAS does well and what narrative focused games do poorly. Rising costs, plateued ceiling = fewer and fewer expensive AAA games being made.
What is humint?
Death Stranding 2 will do well. Will it do Death Stranding well, despite being SIGNIFICINTALY more expensive to make? Not likely.
Obviously all games benefit from a clear, compelling vision. The point I'm trying to make is that old style games are a dying medium. Live Service will continue to grow while hunks of plastic will continue to lose power in the market. PlayStation was smart to recognize this back in 2018 and they're set up for the next 3 years better than you could imagine.
btw, when I say "dying" I just mean it in the way that 2D games "died" during the transition to 3D. Oviously, 2D is not dead.
The graph says that as of March 2024 they almost (must be already achieved by now) generated more revenue than in any previous generation. And more profit than in all combined. So they are better than ever.
"disastrous past two years" -> fantasy debunked by that graph
"monumental drop-off" and stagnation" -> fantasy debunked by that graph, revenue keeps growing evey year
If you mean the drop in profit, according to what Sony said these two years it's because of the costs of their acquisitions (which includes growing their studios) plus also the rise hardware component costs. But still, in half of the generation they made more profit than in all previous generations combined.
Regarding the price drop, they said that in all the previous generations the hardware components got cheaper over time, so even if they starting selling consoles at a loss, over time they ended selling it at a profit, with enough marget to apply price cuts. But in the PS5 happened the opposite, these components got more expensive over time, to the point that they couldn't apply price cut and instead forced them to increase it (in addition to inflation, currency exchange etc) to don't keep the loses from each unit sold too high. They also took several aggresive actions to improve their profitability and compensate that and continue working on it.
Regarding PS5 sales vs PS4, despide having had the shortages issues, not being able to price cut it and the global economical crysis, in terms of units PS5 is outselling PS4 in USA, Japan, China and some EU countries. But not worldwide by a little margin because in some other EU countries is behind. In terms of revenue is outselling PS5 worldwide. And the revenue from accesories, software, subscriptions and off-PS first party revenue is also in all time high, better than in any generation.
Regarding PS5 hardware sales slowing down in units, it's normal because it's what happens in all consoles when they past the peak of their sales cycle curve. As you can see in this other graph, the yearly sales make a somewhat curve for all home consoles, having their peak normally between somewhere their 3rd and 5th year and after that they normally keep declining every year. Switch is different because the curves of portables is different, with a later peak and a longer life than home consoles:
As Sony mentioned, PS5 yearly sales peaked last fiscal year. Which means that going worfard its yearly sales should be decreasing every year, as normal in a console's life cycle.
And well, launch aligned PS5 is super close to PS4. At the current point of the graph for PS5 (last march, when the most recent FY ended) was super close to PS4 and Switch and above them there was only the Wii exception, which had a crazy early peak and then faded, barely reaching slightly above 100M units sold at the end of its life. Sooner or later PS5 will pass Wii.
Regarding potential units sold during the second half of the PS5 generation, we have to consider that around half of the active PS userbase still is in PS4, meaning there's a ton of users who will upgrade later (pretty likely with GTA6 or when games like FIFA, AC, etc stop being crossgen or when big GaaS like Fortnite, Minecraft etc stop getting supported in PS4). And that around half of PS5 sales comes from users who are new to PS5. Meaning they come from Xbox, PC or because of the movies/tv shows.
So no, there's no stagnation or lack of demand at all. PS5 is one of the best performers in gaming history and is behaving as expected at this point of its life cycle.
The stagnation would come from the last few quarters. PS5 sales seem to be hitting a wall. Your graph wouldn't show that.
Yes, they are just after half of the generation and already became the top grossing generation and more profitable than all the previous ones combined. What a failure, Sony execs must be crying! xDD
Wow I was starting to miss this graph. You didn't post it for like 2 weeks?
It's so funny how desperate people are to cherry pick when talking overall strategy and trends. I guess that's their only line of defense?