For a small team with low budget, a game being MP means extra cost due to servers, extra testing etc. To develop it for 3 very different platforms means way more money and requires being experimented in all 3, particularly in tech and gameplay+UI design areas. Being GaaS and specially F2P requires way more money and way more work and specific knowledge and experience not only for servers and post launch content, but for economy desig, progression, balancing, playtesting testing, A//B tests, CM etc.Exactly... But the thing I want out of this is a lot of awesome single-player games too so I hope Sony will focus more on that and then some F2P/MP games and not the other way around hopefully!
I'd leave the console+PC+mobile F2P for all these top Asian companies that during the Jimbo era they signed deals with: Tencent, Netease, NC Soft, Nexon, MiHoyo, Pearl Abyss, Shift Up, CyGames+Kadokawa, Akatsuki+Koei Tecmo and so on. If I was Sony I'd let them use Sony IPs in games developed by these companies and co-published / co-marketed with Sony.
I think potential SEA Hero Projects should be mostly small indie non-GaaS SP games instead. Teams who if releasing a couple pretty successful indie games and grow a bit could later codevelop a game (or post-launch conten) for the F2P games mentioned above that ended being very successful.
The idea behind investing in batches of 12-20 products or services is: one or two should end being very successful hits, 3 or 4 would perform pretty well, 4 or 5 would end cancelled or tanking hard, the rest would perform just ok, barely profitable or almost. In a way that the whole investment ends being profitable, it helps them enter a new market and learn what works and what doesn't there, and they get a handful very successful long term partners from there.
Basically the idea Sony is applying for their dozen GaaS IPs initiative, their other Hero Project initiatives and I assume the mobile gaming projects they may have signed with all these Asian partners.
