Their last game struggled to sell 1 million. Saros is not going to boost that ridiculously. It'll probably sell less than Astro Bot. Look at the trailer views.
It was a weird niche game, new IP and a next gen only PS5 exclusive for its launch window from devs who until now made only small games, so obviously it would be stupid to expect it to sell like GTAV.
We don't know the Returnal sales until now, but Sony got so happy with them when launching the game that bought their studio a month after shipping the game.
PS5 now has a way bigger install base and Returnal generated a good word of mouth. So pretty likely this one will sell better.
Like Returnal, Rift Apart, Astro or Stellar Blade, pretty likely won't sell many millions of copies but pretty likely will sell a few of them, will be profitable and will win some awards. So Sony will be happy with it.
Uh huh, and does tentpole include remakes are just new IPs? Also can we have Astrobot Rescue Mission remastered to the PSVR2? I'm amazed this hasn't happened yet.
Hermen originally refered as 'tentpole' to new SP AAA games, the traditional big PS Studios game like as could be a new GoW or DS2.
I assume he originally counted Astro Bot as 'experimental' instead (smaller games targeting new genres/audiences/platforms not dominated by their 1st party). But after it won so many awards I think he promoted it to 'tentpole'.
I assume remasters don't count as tentpole, and anything related to VR counts as 'experimental'.
But well, if Astro has been so successful I assume they'll now will want to milk it. A Rescue Mission port would be great, but according to their studio head it was complicated because the PSVR1 headset had the camera in the TV and PSVR2 in the headset, which since this game did use head movement as important game mechanic complicates the port considerably.
Other than this, they didn't announce any 1st or 2nd party game for PSVR2 since a lot of time ago, maybe because didn't sell enough to justify them. And may consider that the potential sales of this remaster maybe wouldn't be enough to make the remaster profitable.
In hindsight was Sony wasting this gen with gaas an actual good thing? Now that we witnessed so many failures, so much money lost for Sony on Gaas, maybe this gives them now a clean slate for next gen in regards to not seeing Gaas anymore or mostly gone. Maybe we'll start to see maybe a ratio of 80%-20% in the favour of single player games. Or maybe that number can even be further to like 90%-10%.
They 'didn't waste this gen with GaaS'. MLB, GT7, Destiny 2 and Helldivers 2 are very successful, pretty likely having already providing enough profit to fund budgets of the failed, cancelled, not greenlighted and remaining half a dozen GaaS to be published. It's a successful and profitable initiative before releasing its the second half.
It didn't affect the budget of the non-GaaS games, which also increased. The GaaS initiative was an investment with a separate budget made on top.
From what they released last year and what they have planned for this and next year, seems that their idea is to release a couple of GaaS per year: one backed by top tier devs or IPs and another one more experimental / niche.
They are expanding their 1st/2nd party both in GaaS and non-GaaS to cover all the main genres / audience segment in each business model.
1 singleplayer tentpole game every year and 2 live service dumpster fires as well. I bet people can't wait for Fairgame$ and Marathon.
Regarding tentpoles, their idea isn't '1 per year', it's 'at least 1 per holiday season'.
As an example, this year they'll release minimum (more can be announced) 3 tentpole games: Death Stranding 2, Lost Soul Aside and Ghost of Yotei, being the Yotei one the one for holidays.
For next year they'll have minimum (more can be announced) Saros and Wolverine, being pretty likely Wolverine the one for holidays.