I think it is time for a lot of people to come to grasp with the fact that while the market leader for over 20 years, Sony has never really been able to capitalize on their market leadership. They've run razor-thin margins, while others in the industry have shown serious growth outpacing SIE.
Sony itself is a relatively small company, while other companies have entered into tech and eclipsed them.
Netflix was founded in 1997 and is worth more than Sony by almost double. Activision as a whole was almost worth as much as Sony as a whole well eclipsing SIE.
So you have to ask yourself what is holding SIE back when they're getting 30% of all digital game sold on PS4 and PS5.
It's their razor-thin margins. The high cost of their games and marketing and selling PS5s at a loss.
That's why I said Jim Ryan was creating new
pillars for PlayStation as a business and why the
Sony we knew was going away.
Sony is going to cancel a project if they don't feel confident that the game is going to deliver within the expectations of the Sony brand. If you know a game is going to be a 60 on metacritic, why keep pumping money into it? Microsoft delayed Redfall and pumped more money into it, only for it to be a complete failure but also an embarrassment to the company.
Sony put out 2 games this calendar year MLB The Show 23 and Spider-Man. One has a MC of 82 and the other 91.
They also put out a third game Horizon Call of the Mountain. This game had to be rushed out to have content at launch for VR2. It's a 79 on MC and firesprite had a RIF after the game released. Sony wants 80s or higher.
They want consistently like Nintendo. Jim Ryan is emulating Nintendo's model in a lot of ways. Consistent quality, prices remaining high, games are rarely discounted and almost always go back up to the original price. Selling hardware at a profit.
What happened when Naughty Dog let Iron Galaxy handle the port to PC for TLOU? It blew up in their face. Maybe not Iron Galaxy's fault given again a finite amount of time to make it out for the release of the TV show, but that's why so many licensed games were so bad for years. Naughty Dog said they'll handle PC ports internally and by design now.
My guess is that Spider-Man 2 could have been a 95 type game if they didn't need to get this out for the holiday season.
Twisted Metal was probably going to be complete trash if they released it in line with the TV show. There would have to have been layoffs as a result of the failed transmedia strategy.
They've got a lot of moving parts, and they're juggling a lot of things that need to line up with each other. I think Naughty Dog moved off the multiplayer game because they want to make sure they can release TLOU2 on PS5/PC when the second season comes out. That's priority number 1.
Sony bought Audeze and they probably wanted these headsets out in time for Spider-Man's launch, but you really can't rush the manufacture of headsets otherwise you're going to have a quality problem.
Sony is probably realizing that they're reaching the limits of how much they can really ramp up internal studios through recruiting alone. I think we can expect them to look at M&A in 2024 to bolster the game pipeline.
twistedvoxel.com
For the past few months, I knew this layoff wave was coming
I love PlayStation & I always will… I mean, I stayed when I had the chance to leave, so obviously!
thicc_girls_are_teh_best has a genuine challenger.
Mibu no ookami
was saying: Sony scaling back on the GaaS volume and preparing for a larger M&A. 10-12 GaaS games in 3 years was always ridiculous; if they're identifying games in dev which look like they can be cancelled, then maybe they are cancelling them before too much additional money is sunk into them.
Spiderman 2 reviews
