Live Service Games Made Over 40% of Sony’s First-Party Revenue in Q1 FY25
Killjoy-NL
Member
BluePoint was dedicated to making remakes, so I wonder how much of a loss their canceled live service game really is. Given that people whine about remakes/remasters as well.
And it's not like ND had their entire studio working on Factions 2. It wasn't even their main team.
The former is already the case afaik. If you want to expand your portfolio, you need to invest.
They were aware that things would be tricky and that there would be failures. Ryan clearly stated that.
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Dr. Samuel Hayden
Member
Keep going then, at least it'll be fun to watch
NickFire
Member
I'm just talking about the push they went on. GT and Show not new.
Dafegamer
Member
The only good call is Helldivers from that list, we don't even know if the other service titles made much of a dent overall, compared to Helldivers. The problem is, Sony all of a sudden putting all of their cards into service stuff out of nowhere, which made them to cancel like 60% of them so far, that's the problem. Nobody's complaining about their service plans, just their willingness to throw all their cards into service stuff so nonchalantly which made them to cancel so many of their Games, causing a huge gaming (first party releases)drought as a result
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Haha, I knew it that GT was considered a live service.
On the other side it might mean we may see it go multiplatform with a delay of 6-12 months maybe… maybe not…
Killjoy-NL
Member
1st party output drought perhaps, but there is absolutely no guarantee things would be better if they didn't invest in those live service games. No matter if some were cancelled.
Games like Returnal, Stellar Blade and Rise of the Robin weren't exactly commercial hits either.
Their main studios would have the same output regardless.
And "gaming drought" should be seen in regards to their competitors, because there is no competition for Sony this gen.
Whatever Sony is lacking, Xbox is filling that gap on Playstation, so on Playstation there isn't exactly a 'drought'.
Ironically, those 'amazing' singleplayer players Xbox has delivered to the Playstation installbase were all flops.
Apart from Forza Horizon, which seems to be doing okay.
So that isn't exactly making a case for the notion that full-focus on singleplayer games is automatically better.
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Astray
Member
The direction of travel is super clear tbh.
The consumer behavior that made the PS4 successful is fundamentally different from what's making the PS5 successful. The sooner people realize that, the easier it will be to accept whatever Sony changes about its output of games and where they put them.
The consumer behavior that made the PS4 successful is fundamentally different from what's making the PS5 successful. The sooner people realize that, the easier it will be to accept whatever Sony changes about its output of games and where they put them.
Saber
Newd Member
Most of the games you actually launched recently are nothing but "remasters".
Of course if you didn't launch that much of bangers the numbers from live services will look better. And this is "40%", not to mention the amount of big failures, unless OP and other people want to burry their heads in the sand and pretend Sony didn't burn tons of moneys in hundreds of live services that fails hard. What you think happen to the all that money? Returned? How many times you kids needs to learn that live services are high risk market for a reason?
Of course if you didn't launch that much of bangers the numbers from live services will look better. And this is "40%", not to mention the amount of big failures, unless OP and other people want to burry their heads in the sand and pretend Sony didn't burn tons of moneys in hundreds of live services that fails hard. What you think happen to the all that money? Returned? How many times you kids needs to learn that live services are high risk market for a reason?
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Sony also needs to increase their amount of "smaller" titles (I consider smaller titles anything under $100 million and taking less than 4 years to make). Those gaps don't all have to be filled by Live Service Games.
Hemingwayoffbase
Member
I feel like sports games shouldn't even count as "live service" in the same way as something like Concord or Destiny does. They're two completely different audiences for the most part.
I know so many people who just play sports games and never touch any other kind of game. It's almost a different business model at that point.
I know so many people who just play sports games and never touch any other kind of game. It's almost a different business model at that point.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
And this is some of the best ways to get to the Live Service gaming money! Everything doesn't have to be Concord like.....
I'd hope not!
People seem to have a hard time accepting that Sports games are totally in the Live Services category. But why? What you are describing is exactly how many other people play Live Service games like Fortnite and Destiny though.
yurinka
Member
Yes, all companies want to invest in games that make a lot of money even years after release, creating a stable, steady and predictable pillow of revenue and profit that highly reduces the pressure on new game releases.
Publishers like to have a huge percentage of game revenue coming from "catalog titles" (meaning, released in previous fiscal years) to have certain stability, sustainability and predictability in their results. Specially now when new AAA games cost around $300M.
Non-GaaS games with SP only bolded (some of the GaaS can also be played in single player too).
Q1 FY25 (Apr-Jun), the quarter she was talking about:
- Death Stranding 2
- Days Gone Remastered (+ DLC in case of PC, included in the remaster)
- TLOU2 PC port
- Stellar Blade PC port
- Destiny 2 mini-expansion
- MLB The Show 25
- Freedom Wars Remastered (licensed to Bandai Namco)
- Spider-Man 2 PC port
- Patapon 1+2 Replay (July 11, licensed to Bandai Namco)
- Midnight Murder Club (August 14)
- Helldivers 2 Xbox port (August 26)
- Destiny Rising (August 28, mobile game with >9.8M users preregistered)
- Lost Soul Aside (August 29)
- Everybody's Golf: Hot Shots (September 5, licensed to Bandai Namco)
- Ghost of Yotei (October 2)
- Marathon (delayed apparently to be released this or the next quarter)
- Destiny 2 mini-expansion
- Convallaria (TBD, apparently 2025)
You can like it or not, but most main Sports games nowadays are GaaS: EA FC, NBA 2K, MLB The Show, Madden NFL... There are many game types, sizes, business models and game genres within live service games. These yearly sports games are just one of them.
MLB and GT are part of their GaaS push, same as Helldivers 2, Destiny, Marathon, Concord and so on. In fact they announcing the push mentioning MLB as the first one of the push.
The push was to put in the market (sometimes via acquisition) a dozen GaaS from 2021 to March 2026 (later they removed this deadline) in the market of a dozen IPs. So far they released GaaS of 6 IPs, with apparently 4 more to be released in aprox. a year from now.
They said that were going to be of different genres and sizes and some were going to be for smaller niches, they weren't expecting to all 12 become the next Fornite at all.
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Miyazaki’s Slave
Gold Member
Strike that...I am super confused. Carry on..
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NickFire
Member
I agree with you. My intended argument is the "push" to focus on live service (over single player in eyes of some) didn't do all that great so far, because racing and sports are natural expansions into live service and not part of a new strategy. These were happening no matter what IMO.
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Dafegamer
Member
Exactly, Service games are always high risk. Makes their overconfidence/reliance on those service games even more baffling. I mean 60% or something of their new gen first party budget went into development of service stuff, many of those cancelled already, which was literally wasted money. Someone with Sony's experience in the industry wouldn't have made the same bad rookie mistake.
Gamer_By_Proxy
About to beat off
Fuck everything and everybody. Gamers were a mistake. Fortnite is el diablo. GaaS is incel approved not gooner approved.
yurinka
Member
Well, they are different things:Remember Sony's projected investment chart for 2025? 60% of investment returning 40% of the revenue? Just one quarter, but still
The revenue is from already released games and post launch content.
The investment is for unreleased games and post launch content.
Remember that successful live service games get post launch support during 5-10+ years and to pay this + server costs isn't free, even if the post launch support outside maybe the first month or two (once the game breaks even) is self funded by the game's own revenue.
Meaning, a huge chunk of these dark blue bars (pretty likely the enterity in FY25) is paid with revenue coming from the GaaS themselves.
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mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Oh okay. Yeah, agreed. That's my biggest reason why I hated Jim Ryan so much. That fake "push" into live service was the wrong approach. Especially when you consider they already had franchises that could feed that beast, like you're saying.
They didn't need to fund 12 new GAAS games. They should have greenlit 3-4 new GAAS games instead. Additionally, why did Sony acquire the studios that were developing Concord and Fairgames? They had never released a game in their lives before. It was such a waste of money. We all saw it coming.