I wouldn't mind the rundown refresher "if you weill". I get my late era SEGA stuff confused alot.
Does this comparison point make Andrew House/Jack Tretton into Sony's Tom Kalinskie for the PS3 turnaround?
Sony hires former MS 1st party business manager as a business finance manager
- Thread starter Johnic
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Does this comparison point make Andrew House/Jack Tretton into Sony's Tom Kalinskie for the PS3 turnaround?
When it's someone who managed finances for Xbox's live service output, combined with Sony basically spending 80% of their recent reveal time 1P software-wise between live-service/GaaS titles and PC ports, and knowing out of a stated 25 1P games in development (some of which have already released), almost 50% of them are GaaS titles, let's just say it's not reassuring of the strategy going forward.
Again, that's just off what we know.
I wouldn't mind the rundown refresher "if you weill". I get my late era SEGA stuff confused alot.
Does this comparison point make Andrew House/Jack Tretton into Sony's Tom Kalinskie for the PS3 turnaround?
I hadn't thought about it that far
. I don't think those two have direct equivalents from Sega's console days, because it turns out Kalinske's accomplishments weren't as big as history remembers them. That damn 1996 Sega document leak!But anyhow, Bernie's basically the reason the Saturn died in America and never got a real second chance. He hated 2D games and basically kept many of them from ever leaving Japan. He pissed off Victor Ireland and Working Designs, who dropped Sega and went exclusively to Sony in 1998. He publicly said the Saturn wasn't Sega's future at E3 1997, so many 3P got the go-ahead off that to either rush what few Saturn games they had left in the pipeline, or cancel future Saturn releases outright (or in some other cases, start working on Dreamcast versions of those games).
He was basically an albatross that suffocated any hope for Saturn in America out of it because he wanted to push the Dreamcast instead. IIRC he's also the one that announced Dreamcast at $199 when Sega of Japan wanted $249 to avoid taking too big a loss on each system sold. So, yeah, they got Peter Moore in there ASAP.
Although, we now know (or at least it's news to me) that Irimajiri took over Sega of America sometime after 1996 to help assess the true state of operations there, and see just how badly the finances were.
I'm being a bit hyperbolic when I say this hire is the "same" as when SOA hired Bernie Stolar. But, are there some shades of similarities? I think there could be. Bernie was sacked by Sony for not being great at his job. Now Sony are hiring an Xbox guy who oversaw live services finances, for a division that only saw real growth in live services revenue through IP and studios they purchased which were already successful well before MS bought them (Minecraft, ESO, Fallout '76 etc.). Sea of Thieves, one of the few in-house live-service/GaaS titles from Xbox, was a disaster at launch and took years to finally become somewhat profitable. Halo Infinite's underperformed in terms of MTX revenue. The Forza games aren't big revenue generators through MTX & DLC with their live-service models.
And yet this is someone Sony's apparently hired for their live-services financial model analysis. We don't even know how profitable Xbox as a gaming division even is, and I don't think this hire can legally spill that tea to Sony (NDAs). I just don't get it :/
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This guy really is desperate for a job at Sony. Jim doesn't even need an ambassador program when he has this amount of dickriding.
I am always gonna wonder about Factions 2 and what Bungie's review meant, was it really not good or just not monetised to hell and back, trying to nickel and dime the players? I doubt if the game will even be released at this point.
MS lit a fire under Sony's ass with the ABK acquisition and Sony is DESPERATELY clawing and throwing shit on the wall hoping that something sticks with their GAAS/ live service games and make up (at least partly) for the revenue that they will lose with COD after 10 years.
But have you thought about the profits? Jim Ryan is the most successful CEO of all time. He single handedly invented the wheel, oxygen, console gaming, space travel, and toasted bread.
Sony knows they got fleeced, but it was the only way they could've kept the talent. We've consistently seen people leave Xbox's studios after they were acquired, so Sony had no choice but to do it. Still, they should've never bought Bungie to begin with; that and Nixxes were objectively awful acquisitions.
Which is a terrible mistake, the ABK deal will hurt Xbox more than it will help them. Sony should've just stuck to what they were doing and double down like Nintendo did, instead of just panicking and and praying that something sticks.
They will likely lose a lot of talent and a lot of money, but they are willing and able to throw tons of money at Xbox just to keep it existing.
Sony needs to step up their acquisition game the genie is out of the bottle, they need to move to secure as many 3rd party IP as possible, they cannot rely solely on their 1st party titles.
I don’t want to speak for Yurinka but this site has become filled with quite frankly irrational Sony doom and gloomers with opinions based not on reality, instead prefer to get worked up over stuff made up in their heads (or reading twitter). It’s almost wilful ignorance at this point and yurinka has at least tried to remind people PlayStation is either doing very well or strategically it is NOT all in on gaas only which usually is ignored to continue pushing the doom and gloom.
Let’s be honest the reputation of GAAS gaming is already extremely low before Sony ever released a single gaas game. That’s not on Sony, blame the countless companies exploiting the model to release either unfun, unfinished, blatantly micro transaction heavy games and promised content that never materialises.
Sony have reiterated the importance of single player games (in many interviews unfortunately some here never read) in fact Jim has come out and said they will never stop making them. How people forget lastgen when the rest of the industry decided gaas gaming was the future (chasing money), single player games were being mocked left and right and seen as something from the past and uncool (think about what the ceo of EA said at that time), Sony continued making them against industry trends at the time. Some people here forget that. And I thank them and 1st party studios for sticking to their beliefs and releasing hit after hit as today they make (with few exceptions) the best single player experiences in the industry envied by many.
Those same companies are now ironically scrambling to catch up (EA).
It’s important to remember Sony are trying to branch out this gen to consistently cover more genres and operate more self sufficient. A long time coming.
For now this heavy gaas push is needed for Sony to be taken seriously by the public as THE platform for multiplayer gaming. From a company perceived for so long as single player focused.
By the next showcase this will all balance out with plenty of unannounced first party studio games to get excited about. A quick run through the all studios suggests there’s plenty cooking.
Can respect others opinions even the doom and gloom opinions probably come from a good place of wanting Sony to succeed (against an unchecked MS buying spree) or likely because of the vast amount of noise online. The relentless Fud / misinformation campaign this gen where down is up, up is down, Sony is somehow incompetent, MS despite Series S and dozens of other mishaps ARE competent has turned reasonable rational gamer brains to jelly.
The fact that the last one was a showcase not a state of play (a showcase that was not had in a long time), shows that Sony leadership wants to force the players to jump on the GAAS/liveservice bandwagon. They basically tricked the fanbase into being excited and showed them shit that only the leadership is interested in.
Just because Sony is doing great now, does not mean that they will continue to do so. Their failure to move to secure 3rd party IPs is a great display of either incompetence or shows a great lack of confidence (unreasonable IMO). Even if MS pulls out of the gaming industry, they will still hold any IPs they acquire hostage.
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Just because other tried it first, doesn't mean we can't criticized Sony for doing it. They have 12 of these games in the works. Not 2-3, 12.
Jim Ryan saying something doesn't really hold water. The same goes for all these executives. We're talking about the same man that spouted "we value generations". It's just PR. We're in a situation where they're investing more in GaaS that traditional games. We have that info from their own financial presentations. That's a cause for concern.
I somewhat agree with them branching out. GaaS are what bring in money. I just think they're going overboard with them. Especially since we have no idea what SP games they're working on. Their last showcase was horrible.
And that brings me to Sony's second biggest issue, first being inability/unwillingness to secure IPs, lack of communication. We have no idea what they're working on outside of a few games, one of which is being released soon. We do know that they had ND working on a GaaS that got trashed by the overlord Bungie. Again, not a good look.
If Sony wants to prevent people whom criticizing them, show something. And by something I don't mean a slide showing how they're investing more in GaaS that SP games.
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Sony deserved the criticism after such a long wait between showcases gamers including myself expected more. But they’re not forcing anyone to play gaas only offering it to the huge market of players that do enjoy it.
I shouldn’t need to point something so obvious out. Company makes A, now company makes A&B but gamers see this as company now only makes B.
And I’m like what??!! How?!
when you say failure to secure 3rd party ip do you mean outright purchase because they're already getting all the ip, most timed or full exclusives and most big marketing rights, an advantageous position to be in.
Says who? You say our talking points are from Twitter, meanwhile the only time you hear this sentiment that "PlayStation is the single player box" is only from xbox fanboys on Twitter and crappy forums. No one in the real world thinks this lol, it already is THE platform for multiplayer gaming (besides PC obviously), which is why every big 3rd party multiplayer game do best on PlayStation. It's not 2011 anymore, no one is playing Gears or Halo, those games are dead. Everyone is playing the same Apex, Fortnite, CoD, Fifa, etc, the "xbox is multiplayer focused, and PlayStation is single player focused" narrative was never anything but fanboy drivel. Sony doesn't need to waste resources developing 12 gaas games to be perceived as a platform that they're ALREADY perceived to be....
Because Sony's messaging has gotten rather imbalanced. It's that simple. We went a long stretch for about a year with the main SIE news being small start-up studio acquisitions, rebuking to the ABK deal (and ensuring drama), sales reports (ironic that the thing Sony got made fun of years ago spending so much time at E3 for is now hotly anticipated and endlessly discussed by many people today. How times change..), and live-service/GaaS announcements and reveals, PC ports, PSVR2 and...Spiderman 2, which is due in about two months.
Keep in mind I'm focusing specifically on the 1P studios here, not 2P/3P announcements or deals like Stellar Blade (which might not release this year) and Rise of the Ronin, or the new China Hero Project reveals most of which are many years off from release. If the May showcase had even one new 1P traditional AAA (or two 1P traditional AA) game reveal(s) alongside everything else shown, the reception would've gone much better and I don't think we'd be seeing so much questioning or critique of Sony's future strategy. It'd have gone a long way towards showing that they're still committed to a balanced output of traditional and GaaS titles going forward; instead we just have to take their word for it. And, considering the vast majority of developments with SIE I highlighted above, very few if any involved new 1P AAA or AA traditional games.
The May Showcase was the first main Showcase from SIE in almost two years, so it wasn't unrealistic to expect a couple new 1P non-GaaS IP to be revealed there. We know they'd of been PS5-only games, adding extra value and also favored outlook to see the PS5's capabilities flexed further.
Company made product A almost exclusively for decades. Then company turns and focuses most of its funds on product B.
The way they go about it is also moronic, making 12 GAAS at the same time. Imagine if 4 of those turn out to be great. Who will make enough time to play all 4? Or two? They will end up cannibalizing their playerbase if more than one of their GAAS succeeds. Not to mention the already established games of that type. It's not like they have a billion users to be able to afford this scattershot approach. Meanwhile, funding for SP games are lower than those for GAAS ( yes I know that ammount will increase overall going forward, my point is their main focus now are GAAS).
Regarding the 3rd party, timed exclusives are not the same as owning the IP, clear as day. I could accept that I had to wait for Starfield say a year, but now Bethesda ( and most importantly all of their IP) is in MS hands forever. What IP are Sony locking down???