Shuhei Yoshida: Only Four Out of Ten PlayStation Games Make Money, but Sony Will Always Support Talent

[DonFerrari]

impertinence said:
Obviously, you can't expect every new idea to be profitable, but this strategy seems an awful lot like the 'every electronics' strategy that has brought Sony itself to a very unhealthy position. (For those who don't understand the comparison, Sony has for a long time attempted to position itself in every single electronics market and let the hits pay for the many misses. So they carry a toxic TV division for ages for example, hoping big hots in whatever will pay for their position as a premier TV provider).

The problem here is that 'supporting talent' is becoming more and more expensive (game budgets are going up) while there is significant push back from the consumers against increasing cost of the games (whiny gamers don't want to pay $70 for extremely expensive to make games), on top of that despite what people want to believe here, the customer base is constantly bleeding people to lower cost options such as phone and tablet gaming.

In short: AAA model is unsustainable.

AAA isn't unsustainable... throwing too much money at all games and wanting everyone to release just AAA is bad though... but in another thread about this we saw a lot of people complaining about Shuhei saying he doesn't understand the mentality of people wanting only AAA. And also people complaint about the "expect fewer games".

And Sony saying only 2 bring big money, another 2 break even and 6 is a miss (but if he don't disclose how much it lost we can't afirm it was a failed AAA, could be a smaller game that even costing little still didn't profit).