Sony on the brink of corporate upheaval, drastic changes

[heruamon]

neotea said:

jammy2211 said:

richardhutnik said:

Demotruk said:

richardhutnik said:

Demotruk said:
My prediction for what Sony will do with SCE:

Keep it. They'll scrap other divisions and sell various intellectual assets for finance but since they wouldn't get a good price for SCE they'll cut their losses. ie. They'll continue to produce the PS3 but won't drop the price unless it's selling at a profit. They'll continue to make software, but more conservatively. Lower budget, lower risk titles. They'll lean on third parties for bigger titles. They will not spend money on R&D for future consoles until they are in a more stable financial position.

Cutting back on your own development, and leaning on third-party, when you are the last place console, is to end up putting yourself even further behind, because you don't have as much of a chance of producing exclusive killer apps.

 

 

The ultimate goal is not to win the console war, but to make money. Sometimes you have to cut your losses.

That is true, but momentum and all the benefits that come with having marketshare, come from winning the console war.  In the videogame business, if you make yourself a niche player, third party developers leave you, and you end up not having people buy your console, and you drop off the cliff and eventually have to stop making consoles.  This is what happened to Sega and others.

 

 It's a bit different this time, because third parties won't abandon the PS3. Developing a game for PS360 costs an extra 5%-10% on the costs of making it a 360 exclusive, no one's going to ignore a 20 million+ userbase while the console market is like it is.

 I'm not really sure what Sony can do to turn SCE's figures around other then wait. Maybe shut down the crappy developers they have that no one cares about, but it'd all be pretty insignificient.

 

 

They certainly wont abandon the ps3.  your likely to see less and less exclusives and with the way publisher not faring to well in profit your most likely see less and less games in development.  Also your see games that wont have as much experiment to them since they dont want to take the risk and your  likely see more of cut and paste games.

 

 

If you already have the capacity to develop for the PS3, say like Square does, it would be crazy to not do multiplatform, since it's been reported by several developers that it's not that much more to do so, and you also reduce your risk.  The issue is for developers that DON'T do ps3 might be resistant to doing so, and take for example Blizzard.  They are current the top PC developer, imho, so porting to the 360 is an easy task, but are they going to be willing to port to ps3 as well?  Maybe not, and they aren't likely to allow another part of Activison to simply handle the port, as they are concern about their branding.  Another example is Bioware...sure, they were bought, but for powerful development shops like them, they have ALOT of sway with the main corporate office.  Lastly, how likely will someone like Bungie be to expand, given the risk in completely standing up the expertise to develop on the ps3?