There is a pie for software sales. This pie includes 1st and 3rd party game sales and it also includes games that aren't even on the platform. If there are too many games on the market, that impacts both 1st and 3rd party sales. If someone buys Elden Ring or Zelda instead Horizon, that's money out of Sony's pocket.
And it's
Sony's job to market Horizon, to position its release schedule better, to sell people on their game over competing offerings. Again, you're acting like because more games are releasing, it means less games should exist instead. That thinking makes no sense.
To me it just means publishers have to compete harder to sell their game to buyers. Isn't that the kind of competition people wanted to see?
There's an extent to the number of games Sony can realistically produce and market before they're competing against each other. Releasing more games into a crowded market doesn't make a ton of sense.
Trust me, right now they are NOWHERE
NEAR hitting that number. You can't when your annual output is as low as one or two games
.
Square-Enix's situation with AA releases in 2022 and 2023 is a better example of what you're speaking of. But that's Square-Enix, not Sony/SIE.
You say Sony can cut through the noise but just look at Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, both games performed really well, but were definitely blunted by bigger games around them. Rise of the Ronin was definitely blunted by Dragon's Dogma.
And again, that is purely down to SIE's imprecise marketing. No one told them to release HFW within a week of Elden Ring. They
chose to do it themselves, knowing (or maybe not; at this point they seem very aloof) Elden Ring would've probably been weaponized against their game (which it was). They
chose to release HZD close to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. They
chose to release Rise of the Ronin close to Dragon's Dogma 2.
Hell, they chose to release Helldivers 2 a couple weeks apart from VII Rebirth which might've suppressed buying power and demand for Rebirth, to to SIE's defense on that one, they were caught off-guard by Helldivers 2's massive viral success just like everyone else.
A lot of people, yourself included aren't very well versed in Sony's history.
I don't need someone trying to snidely pose a passive-aggressive judgement on my knowledge. For starters I've never claimed to be a textbook expert on Sony's corporate history nor do I care to. What I've always mainly been interested in is
SIE's gaming history.
That said, don't assume I don't do research simply because we differ on our points of view.
Let's look at your example of Breaking Bad. The show first aired in 2008 and ended in 2013. No one would have known that Breaking Bad would be a major television series and by the time you did realize and started development, the show would have already been over. You'd have to find the right studio AND the right time for them to develop unless you had them stop whatever they were working on, which would make no sense.
Breaking Bad is an evergreen IP. It's arguably just as popular now as it was a decade ago. The fan interest will ALWAYS be there.
So, it doesn't really matter when SIE could've negotiated rights to get a studio going to make a game based on the IP. Why? Because
any time is always the
right time for an IP like Breaking Bad.
But let's focus on the time period, this also came at a time where synergy was pretty low at Sony. This was something Howard Stringer generally wanted to improve at Sony and slowly began to do. At the time Sony generally worked to make as much money as they could on individual deals without as much focus on the bigger picture.
Just because synergy was low, doesn't mean there was
zero synergy.
It's interesting that you recognize that Sony Interactive Entertainment didn't make Sony Pictures IP into games, but you don't also recognize that at the time Sony really didn't license many game licenses at all, that they really didn't have the development teams historically to do it, and that Sony Pictures really didn't take SIE IP and use them for tv and movies either. Gran Turismo came out in 1997 and was an instant success, but it didn't become a movie until 2023, nearly 30 years later. Uncharted and The Last of Us also took 10+ years each. The transmedia strategy has changed.
This is where you're wrong. Before SIE, Sony had Sony Imagesoft, who DID specialize in licensed games. In fact that was practically all they developed and published between the NES, SNES, Genesis, and SEGA CD. And not just licensed games of Sony Pictures IP; Disney IP were also licensed regularly by them for both game development and publishing.
So even before the PS1, Sony had some idea of leveraging licenses to develop and publish video games. And then even going to PS1, Psygnosis made various licensed games themselves. They made & published The City of Lost Children (fun game if a bit obtuse), for example So this notion that Sony didn't have a history of licensed games until very recently or the teams to make successful licensed games is false.
Sony didn't actively become a major software developer until the mid to late 2000s, when they were actively buying studios to bolster their first party development. They didn't become a premier publisher until the 2010s. They didn't begin any major licensing deals until Spider-Man which released in 2018. It made more sense historically for Sony Pictures to license their IP out to multiplatform game publishers like EA and Activision.
These terms you're using like "major" and "premier" are all relative and from a modern context. By late '90s standards, SIE were already a major software developer. They had Gran Turismo, Warhawk, Parappa the Rapper/UmJammer Lammy, G Police, Arc the Lad, Beyond the Beyond, Crime Crackers, Motor Toon Grand Prix, PoPoLoCrois, the entirety of Psygnosis (Wipeout, City of Lost Children, F1, and plenty others), Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, NFL Gameday, Crash Team Racing, and Legend of Dragoon just to name some.
That level of output was comparable to other devs/pubs of the time like Konami, Capcom, SNK, Tecmo, EA, Acclaim, SEGA, Squaresoft, Enix, and Nintendo. By the industry standards and expectations of both the late '90s and early/mid '00s, SIE were
already a major software developer and premier publisher.
You're basically trying to invalidate that, intentionally or not, by using very selective modern contexts and examples to describe their past inaccurately.
This is entirely nonsense and a creation in your own mind.
So like you saying Sony weren't a major software dev in the '90s or premier publisher until the 2010s?
That doesn't mean these things can't land on multiple platforms, which they absolutely are. That doesn't mean a game will be 60 fps on handheld or even console. What a ridiculous response.
You're skirting around the topic.
You said that it would be easier for games to scale, that was made as a general remake. Which also means, it could be taken as a universal statement i.e applicable to all device types.
Meaning the problems I mentioned with those games i.e BG3, Jedi Survivor etc. on those named platforms, shouldn't be happening if what
you said was true.
Which, it isn't, which is why I brought them up.
Even if Helldivers 2 stops today, it's already been a massive success for Sony and would have proven their GaaS strategy successful. Even if all PC players stopped playing the game today, it would still be a massive success.
Helldivers 2 was greenlit and began its development before the modern GAAS strategy SIE outlined at the start of this generation.
Sony hasn't done a lot of things with MLB and again, context is important here. It seems like you feel everything happens in a vacuum.
The context is that they are slow on things that should've been happened by now. If their GAAS strategy were better organized, heck if their multiplat strategy were better organized, a F2P MLB entry would've been one of the first things they pursued.
Sony didn't initially plan on MLB being multiplatform. This is something forced on Sony in 2020. They released in on Xbox in 2021 and the Switch in 2022. The studio has to handle the ports of all versions of the game, but somehow you think they had time to make a mobile version already? They'll eventually probably come to Mobile and to PC, but that takes time, especially mobile. It's a massive endeavor and you have to think from the time Sony thought about doing it, which probably wouldn't have been until 2021 or 2022 at the earliest, and then recognize the time it takes to develop for it. That studio is probably maxed out on what they're capable of doing, so you would probably have to farm out the mobile game, which has its own risks and complications involved.
What happened to 'organic growth'? SIE knew they were going to make multiplat versions of MLB The Show, but didn't bother to expand SSD to handle the increase in capacity? I thought this was something they always did and separated them from, say, Microsoft?
You mean to tell me, they knew from early on they were going to make multiplat version of MLB The Show due to a new deal, and didn't bother to include mobile in that strategy? No one at SIE saw the obvious fantasy league tie-in feature benefits? The revenue & profit potential for a mobile version easily eclipsing a PC release? Didn't see the value in growing SSD or hiring an external partner to develop it? Didn't think the MLB League would be 100% gung-ho for a mobile version of the game?
Yeah, smells like shit leadership and decision-making to me.
You made wild assumptions just like you're making now and what's worse is your arguments for the assumptions never added up and then when you were proven wrong, you never even concede that you were wrong.
You argue in bad faith.
Go ask other people I've had differences in topics with, and I bet some of them will tell you I have indeed conceded on prior points and changed my mind about them. In fact, I do it rather regularly.
But if I'm not doing that with the things
you are mentioning, then maybe that's because what you're countering my points with aren't good enough to convince me I should reconsider my stance?
No one said that SIE was done with acquisitions post Bungie. Not sure which Sony Picture acquisition misses you're referring to.
I haven't said they're done, either. But the likelihood it'd be anything significant has heavily decreased. These companies have finite budgets for M&As, investments and the sort. If Sony Corp are putting 80% of their M&A budget for the next couple years (just as example) towards a film/TV acquisition, they aren't going to suddenly have even 30% towards a gaming-related one, let alone more.
It don't work like that.
It's not just about synergies, it's about return on investment. Sony growing as an entertainment company allows them to leverage things across divisions and that is where the synergies kick in.
So where is the Destiny TV show from Sony Pictures?
You're confusing strategy with execution. Microsoft failed, but so many other companies have been successful with similar strategy. It comes down to execution. In fact Microsoft themselves have had success in this area, so much so that it got them involved in antitrust in the 90s and early 2000s.
Microsoft's "success" was gained through anticompetitive market practices. Obviously, I don't want Sony to try doing similar in modern-day. Also the synergies I'm speaking of are within the realm of entertainment, where the ways to synergize are easier to understand for the average person, and clearer to communicate. They also work more naturally together.
And had they executed better, Xbox would have been worth hundreds of billions of dollars.... Why ignore Apple, Netflix, Amazon, and Google all of which have been extremely successful in leveraging their position for growth?
And all of whom are also guilty to some degree of anticompetitive market practices. Did we forget this part? We gonna pretend that isn't an issue anymore?
Would you say Spider-Man has helped SIE? Sony owning the rights to the Spider-Man movies, almost certainly played a part in SIE even getting the opportunity to publish a Spider-Man game. PR aside, there is no coincidence that their first licensed game with Marvel was Spider-Man. Regardless, would you say it helped them or not?
Yes, obviously Spiderman benefited SIE tremendously. But Sony weren't the first ones approached to make a game with the IP; Microsoft were. And that's just if we're talking about an exclusive game. ABK have made plenty of Spiderman games and that's without owning the film rights.
ABK lost that right because their quality sucked. Microsoft passed on that right because they were ran by idiots and lacked studios to do it justice. SIE became the benefactor.
The thing is Sony doesn't own the licenses for Spider-Man (game) or Wolverine, or X-Men.
Okay, and?
Owning Star Trek, Avatar (ATLA), Spongebob, Mission Impossible, TMNT, Top Gun... would absolutely help SIE. Your primary argument is that you don't think they would make the games because historically Sony didn't make the games for Sony Pictures, while ignoring the history of those IP and their lack of size, scope, and lineage.
It doesn't matter if a lot of Sony Picture's IP lacked the market share or mind share of a SpongeBob; very few IP in the world do, regardless of who owns them. Should other companies have just not bothered making new IP or licensing IP simply because they or their parent company lacked license/IP ownership?
This is just silly. Arrowhead admits that this was their mistake, that they knew it was a requirement and that they should have better communicated the requirement. Looks like Sony jumped in and saved the day for them and removed the requirement, but this was on Arrowhead not Sony.
And all it took was for SIE to go about it in a way to look like cucks. Also they could've avoided this PR nightmare by just announcing PSN account linking as opt-in when they
were ready to implement it again.
Totoki wants to grow all elements of Sony, including SIE, but that growth has to make sense financially. The SIE of today couldn't make best use of all of Paramounts IP, they'll have to expand in order to do so, both organically and organically.
The SIE of today doesn't have to make best use of
all of Paramount's IP, just the ones they are interested in and suited towards. And while, yes, SIE definitely needs to expand both organically & inorganically, the question towards the latter is, will there be devs/pubs on the market willing to be acquired by the time SIE are ready? And if so, who?
That's where if you take too long, you miss your window of opportunity.
Another topic that you're not well versed on. Paramount is already one of the major streaming services with 71 million subscribers. They're only behind Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and Max. Amazon's numbers are totally inflated by prime membership in general, Disney's numbers are aided by buying Hulu, and HBO was always ahead of Showtime.
And what's Paramount's profits off that subscription service look like?
Oh, yeah...right
Adding Sony's content to Paramount+ would be a major boon for the service that is already nearing profitability and would allow them to combine Paramount+ and Crunchyroll in a similar way that Disney and Hulu have been combined.
""Nearing" profitability."
All I needed to hear.
Seems like you are coming around a bit to realize the vision here. Paramount+ isn't currently profitable, but it's nearing profitability. I believe analysts and the company believe that they'll be profitable by 2025, which would align to when Sony would actually takeover ownership of the service through owning the company.
So if they're going to be profitable by 2025, why do they want to sell to Sony? Are the profit margins just going to be too slim to justify sovereign operations and they need to be acquired to continue regardless? What ways are Sony going to massively grow the profit margins to both recoup M&A costs, and justify the acquisition in the first place?
Again, adding Sony's content to the service would make it more successful.
Which content specifically? How would it make it more successful?
Disney+Hulu has been a major success and they will also be hitting profitability soon. At least try to research this stuff before commenting on it.
Their Star Wars shows have been getting bad critical reception and worst viewership. The Marvel shows have been in decline for over two years now. Outside of recent things like X-Men '97 or rare solid films like Guardians 3, the only steadfast successful Disney/Hulu content in both viewership & critic/fan reception have been licensed shows like Bluey.
Sony+Paramount would almost certainly be the market leader when it comes to generation of movies and tv. And there are all sorts of downstream advantages that you don't realize like Sony's ability to remaster so much of the classic paramount properties. Sony's ability to shift all of Paramounts technology to Sony tech which is a boon for both Paramount and Sony Electronics.
Oh great,
MORE remasters! At least these would be movies, I guess.
Again synergies resulting in massive cost savings, that turn the billions in revenue into much higher operating income.
Cost savings how? They're spending at least $13 billion (likely) to buy Paramount. I'm pretty sure some smart licensing here and there would work out better at least in the mid-term if you want to talk cost savings.
Do you know what else will be a boon for Paramount+? Seinfeld which is owned by...checks notes... Sony... And that's just an example of what Sony brings to Paramount+. Sony has definitely been successful farming out their movies and shows to various streaming services, but putting their entire weight behind Paramount+ will make it a juggernaut in streaming.
So Sony owns Seinfeld? And they've never tried making a Seinfeld game?
Hmm,
maybe if they didn't completely give up on internal AA games they could've taken a managed creative approach to a Seinfeld game. You know, the type of thing that for all all we know could've opened up some new creative avenues in the gaming space for others to follow, or become a viral hit (or both).
Sony+Paramount create WAY more content than Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and Apple make individually. That's a big reason why Disney bought Fox and why Amazon bought MGM. My guess is that Apple would have bought Warner if it hadn't been for this antitrust suit the government has brought against them.
Yes, which the government has conveniently not also bought against Microsoft or other Big Tech companies, when companies like Microsoft have regularly violated regulatory agreements multiple times and just paid the fines because they're pocket change to them.
Also the same Microsoft which has an employee whose mother is a judge in a high place of the US district court system. Same Microsoft that pays big money for lobbyists...and they're at least not being looked into in a similar level to Apple? Yeah,
totally not sus /s.
Not sure what you're referring to here.
This:
If these shows can help grow Paramount+ AND be a consistent home for their shows, they can be more profitable rather than splitting the pot with the names above.
This:
Not sure of any internal development studios that Paramount owns, but their IP will do much better with Sony first party and Sony chosen 3rd party development studios working on their IP.
I love it.
