| VersusEvil said: Making the smaller stuff exclusive is non sensicle. If stuff like SoM flopped on PS5 (no idea if it did) then it for sure flopped on a system at 1/3 the install base and a sub service. If anything smaller games should 100% be multiplat, get all the sales they can. |
From what I've heard, virtually every small game they have ported to PS5 has had sales ranging from flop tier to underwhelming. So I just went and looked at TrueTrophies to confirm, and yeah, the data is pretty bleak. Here are the TrueTrophies player counts for each of Xbox's AA and AAA ports to PS5 so far, in ascending order:
Total TrueTrophies users: 404k
- Towerborne- 338 (only on sale for 2 months so far)
- South of Midnight- 634 (only on sale for less than a month so far)
- Pentiment- 1,144
- Hellblade 2- 1,673
- Avowed- 1,669 (only on sale for 2 months so far)
- Age of Mythology: Retold- 2,083
- Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition- 2,253
- Starfield- 4,158 (only on sale for just over 2 weeks)
- The Outer Worlds 2- 4,382
- Psychonauts 2- 5,560
- Minecraft Legends- 7,416
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle- 14,440
- Gears of War: Reloaded- 15,601
- Forza Horizon 5- 20,622
- Minecraft Dungeons- 46,048
For context, a successful AA game on Playstation usually has at least 5k players on TrueTrophies while a successful AAA usually has at least 15k.
So basically, of everything they have ported to PS5 so far this generation, only the 2 Minecraft spinoffs, Gears 1 Remaster, Forza Horizon 5, and Psychonauts 2 are likely to have been considered successful ports by Xbox for their respective budgets, and Indiana Jones is close to that point, another sale will probably push it over the threshold, though it will have taken over a year to reach that point. Too soon to tell on Starfield.
I won't be at all surprised if Asha decides to move everything except for the very biggest originally multiplat (before acquisition) franchises (Minecraft, CoD, TES, Fallout) back to Xbox/PC only. While Gears and Forza did seem to cross the successful port threshold, keeping 2 of Xbox's original big 3 IP's releasing on a competing platform just isn't good for Xbox hardware sales, and it sounds like Asha wants Project Helix to be successful. As for the smaller games, it's a matter of them selling enough copies to be worth taking a number of developers off of each studio's next new game for a couple of months to port their last game to PS5, and it seems like some of their smaller games just aren't selling enough to even cover porting costs (Sony fees, rating agency certification fees, porting team salary while it is being worked on), while very few of those that are making a profit are making enough of a profit to be statistically significant for Microsoft's bean counters. I think in the end, Phil's big multiplatform push just isn't worth the damage it is doing to Xbox hardware or Xbox brand loyalty.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - 1 day ago
