$6758 (-0,52%) Sony is a diversified company in consumer electronics, music and movie business, image sensors, another financial services division, etc.
But today it's all about consumer electronics, the Gaming & Network Services division accounts for 32% of sales. It's also about the Playstation games console.
The Playstation 5 sales figures total 66 million units (as of December 2024). 116 million users are registered in the Playstation Network and around 47 million users use the paid subscription (13% of revenue).
Today, however, we are talking about Playstation Studios. Gaming studios that only belong to Sony.
This means that the games are almost always only released on Playstation.
In the gaming industry, the name Playstation Studios stands for quality, at least in the PS4 era, but Sony is currently struggling with massive problems.
Money is being burned here, but really burned.
For information: AAA games cost an average of 300 million US dollars. According to a leak, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 cost 315 million.
According to the BBC, GTA 6 could cost up to two billion US dollars to develop.
In addition to the money, a lot of time is also invested, of course.
Guerilla Games, a talented studio from Amsterdam, needed the following for the game Horizon Forbidden West 2022: 300 developers, 5 years and 212 million US dollars.
By mid-April 2023, around 8.4 million units had been sold worldwide, so Sony can be satisfied, it's solid for a single platform.
Sony has disclosed the development costs of two major games as part of the court case regarding the Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft takeover, they don't actually disclose such production cost information.
Jim Ryan (pictured) succeeded Kodera as President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment (Playstation) in April 2019.
In 2022, he declared that Sony wanted to launch 12 live-service titles by 2025.
What are live service games?
(Written by Ryktes on Reddit)
A live-service game is a game that has been developed with the sole purpose of keeping people playing for as long as possible, in the hope that those players will pay for microtransactions. The most common way that live services encourage engagement is by making the player feel like they're losing something if they don't return to the game regularly.
In 2016, Rockstar achieved a turnover of half a billion US dollars with GTA Online.
EA generates 73% of its estimated revenue (7.5 billion US dollars) from in-game purchases and subscriptions.
PS: Share price has just fallen by 9%, the company expects net revenue from live services to fall.
The subsidiary King Games (Candy Crush Saga) has a turnover of 20 billion US dollars.
Bungie acquired for 3.6 billion US dollars, over 160 million US dollars in microtransaction revenue between 2017 and 2019.
Live service games can be a goldmine, but they don't have to be.
Sony, the second-largest gaming company after Tencent $TCEHY (-2,38%) was actually missing just that. Single-player games were their thing, with games like God of War, Ghost of Tsushima or Marvel's Spiderman, XBOX was finally left behind because Microsoft overslept an entire generation.
But single-player games only bring in money with purchases, after that it stops.
But now Jim wanted to get a slice of the pie and produce a real cash cow. A huge cash cow meadow was to be created out of nothing.
Let's see what happened to these plans. Jim has since resigned, leaving his successor with a billion-dollar grave.
Two games were released during this time.
- Helldivers 2 sold over 12 million copies on Playstation 5 and PC by 05.05.2024. A real hit.
- Concord 25,000 units sold after two weeks! 25k The studio was even acquired during production. According to the sources quoted by Sacred Symbols, the production of Concord cost as much as 400 million US dollars. The studio is defending itself against these sources, but insiders are now piling on and confirming this. Sony closed the studio after two weeks... Firewalk Studio worked on the game for a total of 8 years, Sony was involved from the very beginning.
As of 01/23/2025, Sony has canceled 7 of 12 live service games.
Sony's management has wasted half the generation pursuing live-service games, only to cut almost all of them.
Bluepoint Games as an example, a developer of the Demon Souls remake.
This studio specialized in single-player and did damn well with it, gamers and press were always satisfied.
Now this studio has been given the task of developing a game with live service game elements. Bluepoint Games has no idea how this works, but thinks Okay Okay Okay if that's what the boss wants, we'll do it.
Video games are not always video games. Single-player and L-S-G are as different as apples and oranges.
Imagine Elon Musk now wants to produce cars with fuel, 12 models at once. Something like that can work, but it doesn't have to.
I didn't think it was a bad idea to produce live service games on the side.
But there were just too many.
I don't know how much the loss is, but if I had to bet, 2.1 billion US dollars.
With a net profit of 6.7 billion US dollars (2024), Sony can handle that.
However, important games will now be missing, Sony is lucky that Microsoft is no longer interested in selling consoles.
In conclusion, I have to say that it was the right move to pull the plug early on. Otherwise Sony would be burning more money.
Sources:
Gamespot:
https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/sonys-live-service-game-status-report-canceled-released-shut-down/2900-6143/#1
ScreenRant:
https://screenrant.com/sony-cancels-live-service-games-god-of-war/
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony
Play3:
https://www.play3.de/2024/11/08/ps5-absatzzahl-aktive-psn-nutzer-spieleverkaeufe-sony-veroeffentlicht-umfangreiche-statistiken/
Play3:
https://www.play3.de/2023/10/02/playstation-live-service-fokus-war-fuer-die-studios-eine-unangenehme-umstellung/
Jason Schreier, US American journalist
Bloomberg News, news agency