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Soundwave on 02 March 2024
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Cerebralbore101 said:

I don't understand the Sony layoffs at all. Didn't they spend 10.2 billion in operating costs to make 608 million in profit? Isn't that a return of 6% on investment? Not bad for being in the middle of a console life cycle where you are still selling systems at a loss.

Also didn't they waste 3 billion buying Bungie and hundreds of millions more on cancelled live service games? Instead of releasing games to PC and firing devs they need to stop burning money on boondoggles like that. Who cares if you sell an extra 2 million copies of a few games on PC if 5 million people skip buying a PS5?

Also, we don't need cutting edge ray tracing graphics. Just keep the visuals ps4 levels and up the framerate.

I think their concern is this is the mid-point of the PS5 and should have been the peak year, but they missed their sales target by a huge number, and so looking at that profit margin ... it's underwhelming to them if that is the peak of the PS5 or near the peak I think. 

The problem is those profit margins will get pushed even slimmer in the coming years as game costs continue to rise. Like I said, it's in their own leaked budgets, Spider-Man 2 (300 million) cost as much as Spider-Man 1 (180 mill) did + an additional high budget $100+ million dollar game like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (120 mill) combined. 

So that means in a period of about 6 years, they've gone from $180 million being good enough for a Spider-Man game to the sequel costing ($300 million) as much as what used to be two large budget games for them. 

That probably also means like the next God of War or Last of Us or Horizon game is going to cost $350-$400 million potentially if they want to go even higher with the graphics.

That's really your problem, they are looking down the road and seeing budgets that are skyrocketing every 5-6 years and they're already not happy with the profit margins of today, in the future it will get worse. 

I've got to be honest too, Spider-Man 2 looks fine, but it doesn't to me look like something that blows away the PS4 generation of games, sure it looks better ... but like almost double the budget better? Nah. If that's all $300 million gets you, what is the spend for a game that's a notch or two beyond that? Probably $400-$450 million+. 

Now suddenly for one game you are paying what you used to pay for like 3 big budget games only a few years ago. Can people understand why that is scary even to Sony? 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 02 March 2024