So, Where Are All These AAA PS4 Exclusives, Sony?

[starcraft]

Dgc1808 said:

Taking a conservative estimate for major first party games at costing $40 million (very conservative for the bigger ones in particular) that'd be a $440 million investment in first party games before taking into account ongoing costs of studio maintenance, paying a single dollar for third party content etc.  Don't get me wrong, I hope that is the case because it'd be awesome, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Ports, sure. That's definitly possible but I'd argue we don't have any reason to think any of those studios are just supporting other studios. San Diego, London, SCE Japan and Santa Monica do this with a lot of indie developers but those are large studios that also work on their own full titles at the same time. None of the other studios on that list have ever done this. SONY has dedicated support studios. SCE Foster City has had their hand in Naughty Dog, Bend, Ready at Dawn, Zipper, SuckerPunch and a slew of other dev's games. They've never made a game of their own. Similar situation for SCE XDev in Europe and a certain division of SCE Japan. All the studios mentioned in that post work on their own games.

Also, i'm not to familiar with how publishing works but i'm pretty sure SONY does just put out $500M in checks all at once. If a game's dev budget is $40M that would be $40M spread over how many years that game's indevelopment. 

EDITED

Either are possible, I guess we'll see.

You're correct in that Sony does not have to write one $500m check in one quarter and be done with it.  But, those costs are substantial, even when spread across two years worth of quarters.  They are also very conservative, the bigger games these days can cost upwards of $100 million per game.