Yes, I get it. You're a gaming flatearther that don't accept reality and say that all Sony GaaS other than Helldivers 2
Even with H2's huge success and whatever D2 DLC mtx they get, there is no way that's covering Bungie's $1.2B employee retention pay off
Pretty likely their GaaS already generated enough revenue to pay the budget of all the dozen GaaS titles including the ones cancelled and not greenlighted as part of the process, and part of the money spent on acquisitions. So make sure the current games and part of the upcoming ones will generate the money that acquisitions did cost.
Regarding the Bungie employee retention bonuses some people got fired or left, so Sony didn't pay part of it. And in case part of them were linked to performance (we don't know if applies here, but it's something very common to avoid that people just sitting in a chair), maybe another part of it wasn't paid.
Btw, they mentioned in the presentation that part of the profit boost is that they did complete paying the remaining acquisition related costs. Meaning, they already completed the retention bonuses (pretty likely were for a period of 3 years).
They'd be more successful if they skipped all the above and just went with GT7 and MLB as usual.
No, Destiny 2 and Helldivers 2 are very successful. And pretty likely Tokon and Marathon plus some other one too. And party will be thanks to having learnt from mistakes made with Concord or Deviation. Game companies know that only retarded people can expect 100% success in every single project, and assume that a portion of the projects will fail. And when that happens, they try to learn as much as possible from that in extensive postmortems to try to avoid having the same mistake in the future.
That's a key reason why Sony's gaming division margins have dried up.
It's the opposite, they increased and are getting record profits. And part of it it's thanks to GaaS and (mosty PC) multiplatform.
That's why Sony has been so gung ho with PC ports and now will release more Switch/Xbox ports in the future. Need to make up high margin sales to comp dwindling division margins.
As Totoki said, Sony kept doubling down on PC ports because they are a very rprofitable business with a high ROI. They cost a couple millions and get profitable selling a couple dozen thousand copies, so even Sackboy get profitable and in most cases they end having huge ROI.
And according to Hermen and Nishino (plus the metrics) a portion of these players end buying a PS5 helping ot increase console active userbase (they are at all time highs).
And well, other than announcing Helldivers 2 for Xbox and the 3 titles licensed to Bandai Namco that also will be relesed in Switch, nobody said that they have plans to make more Switch/Xbox ports. Something that wouldn't make sense specially when Xbox consoles won't exist in a couple years and because Switch 2 isn't porwerful enough to run decently (or doesn't have enough disk space to store) many modern big games.
Their known future multiplatform expansion is adapting their IPs to mobile mostly by licensing it to top Asian devs/publishers, expanding on PC with their upcoming PC PSN store and Xbox consoles to be replaced by consolized PCs that will run Windows and Steam (meaning MS will have the Sony Steam titles there but won't get a dollar from them). Plus as we know, Bungie -including Marathon and Destiny 2- and MLB stuff to remain multiplatform.
And well, we also know they were exploring ideas to expand PS Plus to both PC and mobile with potential dedicated content that could appeal these players, and that they have been working since 2013 to bring some day PS Cloud gaming to smartphones, tablets and smart tvs.
The division sells 2-3x more revenue than 5 years ago and profit $$$ are about the same
The profits are now bigger than ever. But yes, Sony generally doesn't like to leave the money in the bank as profits and they prefer to invest it in stuff instead:
As a few examples, this generation they basically doubled the SIE manpower by expanding many of their teams, creating new ones and acquiring others, plus investing more than ever in both 2nd party and 3rd party deals, while working in more first party games than ever before at the same time.
They also made many investments in external publishers or devs, different types of gamedev tech, acquired EVO, revamped their game sub and cloud gaming plus highly expanded their accesories lineup.
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