| G2ThaUNiT said: 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 |
Despite the lack of console growth since the PS2, the PS4 is still Sony's most profitable console, and can be monetized in ways that you can't do on PC, or on previous PlayStation hardware.
Sony also doesn't really start from scratch anymore with cross generation releases. Ragnarok for instance, launched on over 140M+ units, and sold millions of consoles via bundles. Sony having 200M+ console sales wouldn't really be a non - issue for development costs though. They would inherently make more money with more subscriptions, game sales, etc, but the potential ROI on software releases will still be a major issue. Third party developers have a larger base to sell their games to, but many fail to sell as much as God of War and SpiderMan 2 did in just a few months. Even Elden Ring only sold 5M+ more than Ragnarok in one year launch aligned despite over 150M+ more users to sell to. I'd expect a bigger gap in software sales if PC was truly a long term solution in terms of rising development costs. I don't think that's likely.
In terms of course correcting, Sony identified the issues of ballooning budgets back in 2019, when the PS5 was around the corner, and a lot of games got greenlit, so it really won't be until the PS6 to see how they navigate this issue.
Last edited by PotentHerbs - on 27 February 2024
