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G2ThaUNiT on 27 February 2024
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PotentHerbs said:
G2ThaUNiT said:

If budgets continue to grow as they are, to the point of Spider-Man 2 costing $315 million, we'll be looking at $400 million budgets by the time the PS6 releases. 

Day and date on PC would then become a long-term fix to a long-term problem. But, I imagine that may be why the CFO is taking over. He'll be asking the tough questions of "why does this game need to cost this much and where can we minimize costs?" and keeping studios accountable on the money they spend. 

Because honestly, single player games on PC a year after launch and GAAS titles being on PC day and date is a good strategy. Gets the money flowing from the titles that need a larger playerbase, while bringing extra money from their more expensive titles without over devaluing their console. 

I don't see how PC is a long term fix if budgets keep on ballooning. 

There's not enough growth from PC Day One sales that will keep up with development costs that go beyond 500M+ and keep on increasing. That's even before considering the loss of their userbase, and subsequently the loss of subscription, accessory, and game sales, ending up with Sony making less profit despite launching on more platforms. 

For now, I think what Sony is doing development wise is the right course of action, despite how many people loathe remasters or live service games. They can shorten the port times between PS5 launch and PC release, increase their mobile presence, and open up PSVR2 to PC, among other things, but they won't really be able to tackle these growing budgets until the PS6 IMO, so they have to minimize the risk in various other ways before then.

Well, the most immediate sense in seeing PC as a long term fix is that Sony's best selling console ever released nearly a quarter century ago and has never come close to reaching that high ever since while simultaneously, the cost to making the games they release have quadrupled, if not more.

On PC, you're always going to have hundreds of millions of potential buyers rather than regrowing your playerbase from scratch whenever a new gen console is released. 

If Sony was selling upwards of 200 million+ consoles a generation, then development costs would practically be a non-issue, but that's not the case. The console space has stagnated. Every generation sells nearly the exact same amount of the total number of consoles with very little overall growth from the previous generation, and we're now arriving at a time where a generation of people grew up with mobile devices, which will naturally cause the console ecosystem to start declining with time. 

Hopefully like you said though, they're course correcting as best they can now till they're able to tackle the larger issue of insane budgets. Going by Herman Hulst's quote though, they are looking to speed up their PC output, which I wonder if one day we will get a PC launcher of some sort of integration with PS's ecosystem, which would be pretty interesting. It's definitely taking them a long time to establish their mobile presence. 

I don't think people would have as much of an issue with remasters if they weren't literally just a few years old at most lol. Like the rumored God of War trilogy remaster I imagine would be better received than a Last of Us Part 2 remaster lol

Last edited by G2ThaUNiT - on 27 February 2024