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Kyuu said:
Soundwave said:

Hard disagree especially in the modern game landscape where post 2020 Switch and Steam have become far bigger factors and the Playstation/XBox being the center of everything has diminished. 

If FF7 Remake was releasing now and had the benefit of a Switch 2 day 1 release to go with PS5 + Steam day 1 ... it would sell more. Significantly more IMO. 

Sony is not growing their audience at all either, globally the PS5 is selling below the PS4 which already finished miles behind the PS2 LTD, they've basically hit a roof and their audience base is getting into some ugly age demographics too (lots of 40 and 50 year olds). XBox meanwhile is just in a free fall into nothingness as a brand, but even that should be concerning for the Playstation ... they should be absorbing that XBox audience, but they're clearly not growing. People are just peacing out on consoles period and going to PC or Switch. 

Monster Hunter Wilds just came out and 50%+ of its sales were on PC according to NPD charts ... that's concerning too if I'm Sony. So factoring in XBox too, the PS5 had like maybe a 35-40% cut of MH Wilds opening month sales? That's honestly a bit disappointing. 

It's not news that Monster Hunter is bigger on PC. Sales splits aren't relevant to the publisher so long as the totals remain high. Had Capcom chosen to handle MH Wilds like World or Rise, the final platform splits would have been different, but the totals wouldn't have necessarily been lower. Evidence to the contrary (at least revenue wise) is stronger, it's just that I think Sony (and certainly Microsoft) is less interested in moneyhatting big games compared to the old days, because exclusives that sell less than 10 million on an individual platform are typically not huge system sellers on dominant platforms, and the more a game sells on a competing system, the more a platform holder has to pay to keep it off said system.

But timed-exclusives, even on less 3rd party centric systems like Switch, remain a thing for a reason. The Duskblood's existence speaks for itself, as did MH Rise before it. If the platform holder is willing to pay a fortune, almost any deal can be made, including full exclusives.

For a publisher, timed exclusivity isn't inherently a bad decision. The question is just whether or not the platform holder is paying enough. And you cannot possibly prove that Final Fantasy fell/stagnated due to timed exclusivity, because the series is marred by a ton of poor decisions. You're hyper fixated on exclusivity as if Playstation never had any successful timed or console exclusives lol.

Again I would disagree with that. 

I guess they could have not released on PS5 at all and the sales also would've been the same? See now some Sony fanboys will throw a little fit if you even suggest that. 

The way people consume games has been shifting for years now, I think it really started to accelerate around 2020 and has picked up steam (no pun intended) since then. 

The modern generation of kids really don't have much/any brand loyalty to Sony and if you're not putting games where they're at they're simply going to ignore said game. 

Playstation exclusivity as it existed in the 1990s/2000s is an outdated concept, even Sony themselves (lol) won't even commit their IP to being exclusive to Playstation consoles any longer, who even knows if we're not that far away from something like Last of Us or Spider-Man 2 ending up on a Switch 2 eventually. You can't operate any longer like it's 1999 or even 2010 anymore, you're gonna lose significant amount of sales. 

The big, fat brick stationary home console in a lot of ways is becoming an outdated thing ... lots of people simply don't care for that form factor, the PC or Switch hybrid gives satisifies a lot of gaming needs more than a home Playstation can.

I just saw AMD's latest earnings report ... everything is up for them as a company except for one thing ... their sales from home consoles (so PS + XBox) are down big time, lol. PS/XBox are a drag on their earnings release, tells you that brand momentum is not with those systems. People need to understand Playstation and XBox for a lot of up and coming gaming audience is their *dad's* generation, it doesn't speak to their generation in the same way. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 06 May 2025