Where are the PC game sales for Microsoft games to suggest a shift from Xbox console gaming to PC gaming?
Most of Sea of Thieve's sales, just as an example, have come from Steam and Windows Store, not Xbox.
Forza Horizon 5 did pretty well in sales, most of them from Steam.
Also watching the current MLID podcast ATM, but he and a developer bring up the fact that at GDC multiple devs were speaking about Xbox sales of multiplats being "practically dead" compared to other consoles like PS, or even platforms like PC/Steam. And I'm sure some industry analysts have suggested by now that Xbox software sales overall have declined heavily for 1P and 3P titles compared to other platforms.
Who said PC gamers spend more? If you look at the price history of Spider-Man on PC, you'll see that it has never been under 35.99 USD in the US, but it's been significantly cheaper in other regions. That's what PC gaming is. It's a discount parade, particularly across regions.
And yet this is the platform some people are begging Sony to prioritize for growth going forward. Point out this contradiction to them, not me. I already know tons of people on PC buy games at heavy discounts and the only stuff they're willing to buy at full price are CPUs & GPUs.
That being said, a game can generate millions of dollars relatively easily due to the userbase. If you sell 2 million copies at 5 dollars a piece, it's 10 million in revenue. You're looking at at least 7 million in net. PC games have a very long life, but for some reason people are determined to compare them directly to console sales that generally sell closest to launch.
The console can generate the same type of long-tail sales or, generally, even better, that goes for both B2P sales and revenue. The numbers you give aren't worth jeopardizing potential console sales & revenue for, because they're simply too low.
And that's what I'm really talking about here: how many of these are lateral sales, versus being new customers? I could ask the same for Helldivers 2 in fact, but being a GAAS/live-service title it's exempt from this topic on my end because I'm focused on non-GAAS titles (and by non-GAAS, I mean games primarily developed as non-GAAS experiences, even if they get some form of MP at launch, or get some MP/live-service mode later on in their lifecycle).
Which port costs 30+ million dollars?
We'd probably need more to leak from the Insomniac hack to know, but we know some ports either at present or down the line could reach that amount because, again, why have an arbitrary cutoff at $30 million if you never plan to have ports cost that amount?
We know their costs (aprox. a couple million per port, not 30M) and their revenues, so we know their (aprox.) profits. That's a fact. We also see in the graph they have a huge yearly growth.
The ports whose costs were leaked may not cost $30 million, but they have internally forecasted ports at some point in the future costing that much, hence $30 million was settled for the cutoff amount. How are you not putting this together?
As for the revenue growth on PC, most of that for FY '22 was from Destiny 2, an acquired asset. The PC ports for SIE games that FY were a smaller contribution to that growth.
In several cases cases we have even the exact cost of the PC ports (around 2M) and their revenue during a few early months or years, and have an insane ROI. That's another fact.
Plus the interim CEO stated it, and that they plan to double down in PC to improve their profitability. They wouldn't do if PC would be an unprofitable market. That's another fact.
So all the related facts we have tell us they are very profitable, have a great ROI which is way higher than with new games.
There isn't any fact that shows them as "decently profitable" or "not very profitable".
This is all still just your personal take on the data provided. I could just as easily say your concept of "very profitable" is only relative to the absolute amounts the PC games are bringing in.
When you compare those to the sales and revenue performances on console, they're not impressive. Sony's problem going forward is risking a drop in sales and revenue from the console side of those software sales (both for 1P and also 3P games), and not seeing enough growth on the PC side of both metrics to offset that drop
AND have the expected growth they'd want on PC if the console side didn't see a drop.
Under that pressure, the PC revenue (and specifically, profits) figures simply can't hold up and do all of that heavy lifting.
The data you say "discredits me" (not me, but the leaked slide posted above) was another one found later and apparently made later, I may be wrong but I think it was from shortly after HFW was included in PS+, shown in a table with estimates in a document that was about making estimates on the impact of including a game in PS+, particularly making projections about what HFW was going to have.
A document I assume that thanks to this document about estimates they tought it wasn't a good idea to include Ratched in PS+ as quick as HFW did and instead prefered to wait some time more.
This is quite a reach, I must say.
As far as we know, no PC por costed 30M. The Sony PC ports budgets we know are somewhere around 1.5M and 3.5M aprox, around 2M.
In the table posted above we saw the cost of the Spider-Man Remaster did cost $39M. The remaster, not the PC port. And this is with Insomniac doing it, who with their prestige and in Californa have much higher salaries than an European porting studio.
Again, there is a reason why Jim Ryan specified that any port costing $30 million or more required a more strenuous review: because they are expecting future ports to come up to that cost or higher.
And Spiderman Remastered was in large part made in order to justify a port of 2018 to PC, so you can count it essentially as a port, in a sense.
