What would the shape of this gen been like had Sony not been so distracted with GaaS and PC ports
AA and specially AAA games get more expensive to make every generation. Nowadays games like Spider-Man 2 took over $300M to be made. Current gen big AAA budgets means they have to sell around 8-10M copies to be profitable if they don't have DLC/IAPs, something very little amount of games achieve in a single console specially when not crossgen.
Since digital addons and game subs started two generations ago, the console game revenue started to slowly but constantly shift from full game sales to digital addons and game subs, and nowadays full game sales already are a minority and most of the top sellers are GaaS. On top of this, the gameplay time and revenue also has been shifting both in console and PC from games released the same year to games released in previous years.
So, the percentage of yearly revenue for new paid games (particularly non-GaaS ones) is decreasing but AAA games need more and more revenue every generation to the point most games can't get profitable if exclusive to a single console without DLC. This means that to make only non-GaaS AAA without DLC for a single console would be a long term suicide.
Meaning, instead of making around half of their first party games new IPs as they have been working on according to Hermen, they'd heavily focus on their few top seller IPs (those who sold above 8-10M).
Pretty likely they wouldn't have acquired teams like Housemarque or Firesprite, would have stopped working in IPs like Ratchet or Death Stranding, would have shut down Bend, Media Molecule or Japan Studio (instead of restructuring it splitting and rebranding it as Team Asobi and XDEV Japan). Would have stopped working with teams like Kojipro or Shift Up.
Going forward would have focused mostly in Horizon, Gran Turismo, God of War, Spider-Man, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Ghost of Tsushima and maybe Days Gone with rare cases of new IPs from time to time and pretty likely small spinoffs of these games.
Pretty likely would also gradually decreased their focus on first party content shifting it to become just a platform focused on 3rd party content, hardware, accesories and gamesub.
Why haven't we gotten another amazing remake from BluePoint after Demons Souls in 2020?
The BluePoint head of studio mentioned that they wanted to evolve from being a support studio who makes remasters and remakes to an support studio who works in new games, as they did in God of War Ragnarok.
Where have Sony Santa Monica and Naughty Dog been all gen?
SSM working minimum in GoWR, GoWR Valhalla, Cory's new IP, the next mainline GoW set in a new mythology, a smaller unannounced project and a small team overviewing/supporting the GoW PC ports and movie adaptation.
ND released TLOU2 just before starting the gen, and have been working minimum in Intergalactic, TLOU Online, an unannounced SP AAA that isn't TLOU3 apparently started in 2023, and a small team overviewed/supported the remasters/remakes of Uncharted 4+Lost Legacy, TLOU1 and TLOU2, their PC ports, the Uncharted movie and TLOU tv show.
And remember, AAA require more time to be done every new generation, and the recently released ones took on average around 5-9 years to be made.
STILL NO BLOODBORNE REMASTER! Not even a patch for 60 fps.
Miyazaki said he didn't see the point of making a remaster a generation later because would be too similar, and that would make more sense to keep a two generations distance as they did with Demon's Souls to have a better difference vs the original game.
People have wanted remasters for Killzone 2+3, Infamous 1+2, Resistance, and Motprstorm forever.
I'm one of those who want Killzone or Motorstorm back, remastered or with new games. But seems these series you mention here didn't sell well enough to justify the budget of making new stuff with them.
At what point will Sony gamers start to get pissed and leave console for PC when Sony themselves doesn't seem to care that Ps5 Pro owners feel like we've gotten any priority from Sony and more and more games seem designed for multiplat releases (like Yotei) where its designed not to max out the hardware features of ps5/ps5 pro but seems designed for easy porting instead. May as well be another cross gen game like Ragnarok, gt7 or a fake next gen in name only game like Last of Us Remake and Spiderman 2.
see my reply above to "What would the shape of this gen been like had Sony not been so distracted with GaaS and PC ports", the explanation of why they make games crossgen, port them to PC or GaaS is the same:
AAA budgets highly grow every new generation and reached a point where most non-GaaS games for a single console wouldn't be profitable.
On top of this, AAA games now take around from 4 or 5 to 9 years to be made. Devs got the PS5 devkits in 2019 and only in some cases knew the PS5 specs in 2018. Meaning, games started before then -like most AAA games released before the current year- had to be designed and started to be developed for the previous gen because didn't have devkits, engines or even the hardware specs needed to make a game thought for the current gen. So they made them for the previous gen, and later when they got the PS5 stuff started to work on PS5 versions of them.
On top of this, due to the popularity of GaaS and game subs, around half of the PS active userbase continues in PS4, which means that not making a game crossgen means not being available for half of the active PS population.
HeisenbergFX4
is explaining that first party games are the reason why he and I buy PlayStation and your first response is...
