Sony Interactive Entertainment to layoff 8% of their workforce, close Sony London Studio

[G2ThaUNiT]

PotentHerbs said:

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+ consoles, 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. PC Day and Date would need to elevate all of PlayStation's tentpole titles to the levels of RDR2 or The Witcher 3 to truly be a long term solution for rising budgets. 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. 

Really anything is possible in terms of monetizing on PC. From PlayStation's operating system to game development, it was all made on PC, which is a big reason why I think we will one day see either a PC launcher or PSN integration. We've already partially seen that with Helldivers 2. 

That is true about not starting from scratch, which I know was a big sticking point in Jim Ryan's tenure of "We believe in generations" which I know did upset some, but it was a smart business decision. I definitely agree with you that PC titles are unlikely to elevate PlayStation's tentpole titles. There would certainly be a sizeable playerbase there, but probably wouldn't raise it to RDR2 or The Witcher 3 levels. At the same time though, I wouldn't be surprised if someone in PlayStation leadership is wondering "what if" they did. Helldivers 2, while being a multiplayer game, may have someone wonder what if they tested the waters and put one of their tentpole releases on PC same day as console. Only time will tell, but I woud be shocked if it's not at least being considered. 

I wasn't aware of Sony recognizing the issue of the ballooning budgets, but after 5 years, why would that only be coming to a head now? Games like Spider-Man 2 would've been very early in development. They couldn't have recognized beforehand what kind of budget would be needed?