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IcaroRibeiro on 10 April 2021
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shikamaru317 said:
Dallinor said:

You have to factor in rising development costs and rising development time. That's a huge difference. It has meant bigger studios slowing down releases.

Naughty Dog

PS3: 4 games

PS4: 2.5 games

Sony Santa Monica

PS3: 3 games

PS4: 1 game

This problem is industry wide. As costs continue to rise over the $100 million mark for a AAA title, publishers will be wary of releasing a title early (Anthem/Cyberpunk) and will double down investment/increase development time. Gamers demand higher quality and standards and the games industry will continue to more and more closely mirror the movie industry. Where blockbusters are king, risks are more calculated, investing in sequels is safer than producing new IP and games become more formulated to a specific standard that's proven to sell.

Your analysis is flawed though. You're assuming Sony are making the decisions, when in reality its the market. Those 63 games sold more than those 139 games. So are they losing out on console buyers who would have purchased a console for Warhawk, Singstar or Folklore? Or are they gaining customers because a single title like Spiderman can now move over 20 million units?

Their new IPS during the PS4 included:

Horizon- GG biggest game ever

GOT- SP biggest game ever

Spiderman- IG biggest game ever

Along with the likes of Bloodborne, Death Stranding, Days Gone and Until Dawn.

Not 'Horizon and a few VR titles'.

The thing is that the AAA budget doesn't really need to be as high as it is. These $100m+ AAA's are starting to feel more like a brand new quadruple A tier to me, with games like Sony releases and Rockstar's RDR2 far too big and high budget for their own good sometimes. In this day and age you can still make a good AAA game for less than $50m if you budget well, for instance Remedy released Control with a $41m budget and it sold 2m+ copies, made a profit, and got great reviews (85 meta on PC, was nominated for many awards). 

At this point I'd say that 3 or 4 of Sony's studios are more AAAA than AAA, Naughty Dog, Guerilla, and Sony Santa Monica in particular seem more AAAA than AAA, with Sucker Punch being a bit of a question mark, on the one hand they are the 2nd smallest out of Sony's big studios with only around 162 devs (only Bend is smaller), but on the other it took them 6 years to develop Ghost of Tsushima, which is definitely more of a AAAA dev cycle than AAA. I personally think that Sony should try and refocus some of those studios into multi-team AAA instead of single team AAAA, allowing for faster dev cycles, lower budgets per title, and less creative risk. 

Side note. I lowkey feel those A4 titles are made for the sake of creating an illusion of high quality status that won't allow mid-sized studios to keep releasing competitive blockbusters 

If Sony plus few other studios manage to distance themselves than everything else in the industry they will create some kind of oligopoly

That's how movie blockbuster industry mostly comes down to Disney, Waner and Universal (and Fox before it was bought by Disney) with Paramount, Sony and Lionsgate being the second tier blockbuster producers

Game industry is less likely to archieve such level of dominance because theaters are limited in space and number, so a few blockbuster will always jeopardize the box office performance of smaller budget movies relegated to less screens in theaters, while in gaming you can purchase whatever you want, two games released in the same week are in a competition but barely.

Hope this plan to not work, diversity and competition always brings innovation and quality, I'm sure this will not be the case anymore if only the same studios release the large bulk of blockbusters