Sony president wants to improve margins with Multi-Platform releases.

Christopher wrote:I’d say Returnal is probably the best new gen game, and that at its core is an arcade rogue like. Sadly it didn’t sell too well. But it is a great game that stands out over the big blockbusters with gameplay above everything else. It’s a throwback to fast frantic arcade action.

Probably because it was priced at £70 and didn't drop for ages. I know that I was waiting for it to drop below £50 but it didn't for over a year and eventually came to PS+ before that. Even now, over 3 years on, it has never been below £34.99 on the PlayStation store. It wasn't that long ago that you could get new games for that.

AAA are too expensive at the moment. At the same time that some studios are spending literally $1,000,000,000 on a title, there are indie developers creating games for nothing. Obviously there's a huge gap in the scope of AAA Vs indie, but I'd take one hundred games with unique ideas and a $3,000,000 budget each over one Spiderman game that is technically incredible but plays it very safe in terms of gameplay.

Jezo wrote:

Squinty wrote:Makes me think, have we finally reached a point where games development is simply too expensive now? They've been complaining about costs since the 360/PS3 era.

The problem is what they're spending the money on. Well known voice-actors/likenesses. 1000s of lines of dialogue to be voiced, enough to span multiple, multiple movies. Amazing visual effects and animations (during cutscenes). And what kind of experience does it make? What are essentially interactive movies. How much of that budget goes into developing a new, exciting, fun, highly-interactive gameplay experience? From the looks of things that's not where the money is going. Most of what they spend money on, the majority of players probably won't even experience it - being some obscure trigger for a one-liner no one will even care about. It's a shame really. All that power and they don't use it for the thing it's meant for.

I completely agree. It definitely feels like this in terms of high end graphics. It's all a bit 'so what?' to me. And when you have kids playing Minecraft, a game that looked like gooseberry fool when it was released over 10 years ago, I think things might become less focused on amazing visual production. It simply costs too much now.

I wonder if publishers would drop the price of games if they reverted to a slightly more basic level of graphics, performance or complexity?

"Strawb off we would!1!!11!"

Another quote from the Q&A from the Sony President -

Q: [G&NS and I&SS segments] What will be the keys to improving your operating margin?

A: G&S segment: When it comes to PS5, one challenge that sets this console cycle apart from PS4 and previous generations is that we find it difficult to reduce our costs during the course of the cycle. Unlike high-spec PCs, PS consoles enable us to offer an immersive experience for many people in a safe environment with affordable price. To offer that kind of experience, with costs for components like chips and memory on the rise, one key will be that we continue to sell consoles without substantial discounts [during the course of its product life-cycle] by engaging in product planning that ensures affordability for consumers. Another driver will be first-party titles. Strong titles that achieve growth on PS5, PCs and other platforms will widen our margins. We believe that we have opportunities for margin improvement and intend to pursue them aggressively.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/lib ... 3q3_qa.pdf

I don’t think we’ll ever see Halo on PlayStation or God of War on Xbox. I do think for online games where you can make a continuous stream of money makes sense to put on PS5, Xbox, PC. Helldivers 2 for example makes sense going to Xbox as does Sea of Thieves going to PlayStation.


I’d imagine PlayStation already makes some scratch from MLB The Show on Xbox, PC and Switch. Those games make all the sense in the world to be everything. Games like Halo and God of War are still needed to be console exclusives to entice people to buy those boxes over the other boxes.

Monkey Man wrote:Another quote from the Q&A from the Sony President -

Q: [G&NS and I&SS segments] What will be the keys to improving your operating margin?

A: G&S segment: When it comes to PS5, one challenge that sets this console cycle apart from PS4 and previous generations is that we find it difficult to reduce our costs during the course of the cycle. Unlike high-spec PCs, PS consoles enable us to offer an immersive experience for many people in a safe environment with affordable price. To offer that kind of experience, with costs for components like chips and memory on the rise, one key will be that we continue to sell consoles without substantial discounts [during the course of its product life-cycle] by engaging in product planning that ensures affordability for consumers. Another driver will be first-party titles. Strong titles that achieve growth on PS5, PCs and other platforms will widen our margins. We believe that we have opportunities for margin improvement and intend to pursue them aggressively.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/lib ... 3q3_qa.pdf

affordable?!