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Forums - Sony Discussion - Sony Explains Why 1st Party Games Won't Debut Day 1 on PS Now

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playstation believes in the classic model, high quality games are expensive to make, you need to sell them to get investment back.
On the other hand, Xbox wants to try a new model, a service proposal in which a monthly fee will finance high quality games.

Who's right here? Which model is capable of delivering higher quality games? Which model is more profitable? Who is more sustainable? What is best for users of the respective platforms?

Difficult to decide at the moment, but for now I will take the "more traditional" proposal of Playstation.



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Intrinsic said:
yvanjean said:
Sony is selling you a remastered Demon's Souls for $69.99 on PS5. Remastered is a quick cash grab, can be outsourced, and a cash cow. Playstation Plus Collection is just there to soften the blow for long time Sony fan to go with the $399 PS5 All digital edition. If you enhance your game and offer them in a subscription or offer digital backward compatibility you kill the remastered business.

I don't think you know what remastered is.

And i don't think you understand just why and how a subscription model for gaming is not sustainable. And is not something MS would be doing at all if things were a little... different. And if yu really think about it, it would make sense o you too. But let help you along a bit say thereare20M people paying for GP every month. And these 20M pays an average of 10 months in a year (because people will not pay every single month). That's $2B from GP/year. Now deduct whatever it cost them to maintain the service, the cost to secure the non-first party games on the service, the cost to market it..etc. What's left? Lets say $1B (and this being generous). 

Now imagine that MS makes 4 AAA games a year that cost an average of $80M (some cot more, some cost less), that's $320M to make those 4 games. Now imagine that each game can sell 12M copies in a 12 Month window. And they are sold at an average price of $55 (some buy at $70, some at $60, some at $50 and some at $40). Thats $2.6B+ from just those 4 games. So they make from just 4 AAA games that can sell to around 12M people over 12 months more money than they would make from 20M people paying for GP for 1 year. They turn a $320M investment into a $2.4B return vs a $1B investment into a $1B return (if even that much).

And you really can't see why its a bad business model? And this is just one of many issues I touched on before.

Anyways... called it. This was exactly what I said and have been saying about this. Its not a sustainable business model.

What 4 games are selling 12 million copies each in the same 12 month window?



Gamers such as myself whole was intrigued by the game and tried a couple times to play it only to lose interest due to other games coming out our the clunky old PS3 graphics. This Remake pulls me back in to give it another shot with a fresh look. Maybe I look like a fool for throwing $70 at a game but gaming is a luxury. We are not entitled to any of this. I appreciate what they’ve done here for my money.



Manlytears said:
yvanjean said:

My bad I should have said Remastered/Remake games are a quick cash grab and Sony cash cow.

You are not making a new game from the grounds up and spending hours on level design, Story, Mechanics, Etc.

You are spending about 15-30% of the original budget to Remaster/Remake and slap on a $69.99 price tag on it. 

More power to Sony if people are stupid enough to drop $69.99 on a remake more power to them, smart business. I can benefit after they are done playing with it and pick it up in the bargain bins or they drop the digital price a few months down the road.

with all due respect, and trying not to appear arrogant ... You should moderate your words a little.
Demon's Souls is one of the most influential games of the past decade and the origin of all soulsborne games. It is not up to you to make the judgment about "what is stupid or not", so I suggest you show a little respect for the Playstation Fans.

I'm not calling Playstation fans, I think it's stupid to pay full price for a game that will immediately drop in price after release and that doesn't have a multiplayer component. 

If you're truly passionate about the game and can't wait for a price drop then just get it at full price. We are all gamers and we have all done it in the past. 
Sony, Microsoft, and all third parties love these passionate gamers. But, the smart move is to pick up a great game at a great price.

Demon Souls is not a smart investment, so paying $69.99 for a game that you can get for less than $39.99 just a few months down the road is kinda stupid. I have never played Demon Souls, so I really look forward to playing it for cheap. 




Bandorr said:
yvanjean said:

My bad I should have said Remastered/Remake games are a quick cash grab and Sony cash cow.

You are not making a new game from the grounds up and spending hours on level design, Story, Mechanics, Etc.

You are spending about 15-30% of the original budget to Remaster/Remake and slap on a $69.99 price tag on it. 

More power to Sony if people are stupid enough to drop $69.99 on a remake more power to them, smart business. I can benefit after they are done playing with it and pick it up in the bargain bins or they drop the digital price a few months down the road.

Watch that.

Nice, do you think If I wait long enough I can play this great game on Playstation Plus Collection?



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Intrinsic said:
yvanjean said:
Sony is selling you a remastered Demon's Souls for $69.99 on PS5. Remastered is a quick cash grab, can be outsourced, and a cash cow. Playstation Plus Collection is just there to soften the blow for long time Sony fan to go with the $399 PS5 All digital edition. If you enhance your game and offer them in a subscription or offer digital backward compatibility you kill the remastered business.

I don't think you know what remastered is.

And i don't think you understand just why and how a subscription model for gaming is not sustainable. And is not something MS would be doing at all if things were a little... different. And if yu really think about it, it would make sense o you too. But let help you along a bit say thereare20M people paying for GP every month. And these 20M pays an average of 10 months in a year (because people will not pay every single month). That's $2B from GP/year. Now deduct whatever it cost them to maintain the service, the cost to secure the non-first party games on the service, the cost to market it..etc. What's left? Lets say $1B (and this being generous). 

Now imagine that MS makes 4 AAA games a year that cost an average of $80M (some cot more, some cost less), that's $320M to make those 4 games. Now imagine that each game can sell 12M copies in a 12 Month window. And they are sold at an average price of $55 (some buy at $70, some at $60, some at $50 and some at $40). Thats $2.6B+ from just those 4 games. So they make from just 4 AAA games that can sell to around 12M people over 12 months more money than they would make from 20M people paying for GP for 1 year. They turn a $320M investment into a $2.4B return vs a $1B investment into a $1B return (if even that much).

And you really can't see why its a bad business model? And this is just one of many issues I touched on before.

Anyways... called it. This was exactly what I said and have been saying about this. Its not a sustainable business model.

There's a big problem with your logic in this example here. The first thing is that you're assuming that those 20 million GP subscribers are lost sales of a game. This is far from the truth. Take me as an example, I have GP and never had an interest to play Nier Automata until this year since it was on GP. I totally loved it and I thought it was worth having the physical copy so I bought it on Amazon. GP has open that door to a lot of games to become visible. So instead I see MS making money from GP AND games sold.

Now, there's another matter called forecasting. MS has tons of economists working for them who I'm sure gave them the pros and cons of a subscription service money wise. Whatever those projections were, MS found them to be worth the risk and investment. And let's not forget that Sony and MS have 2 different expertise here. MS is a software company, Sony has always depended on physical sales. If I were to put my money on who is right about subscription services is MS. After all, Sony sure did gain a lot of money after forcing their buyers into PS Plus just like MS did with Live. Plus MS now has GP basically accessible on every device except for IOS. That has the potential to gain new customers that don't have or would ever have an Xbox. How is that a poor economic decision?

So the reality is that we won't know if in the long term GP will be successful. But what I do know is that MS is not only making money selling games on a console, but they are also making money from subscribers and that seems a win-win situation for me.



Nice to see them come out and say its about the money and not some BS reason. Refreshing and appreciated.



In other news: water is wet
How some people think giving away multimillion dollar games for a miserable 10$ monthly subscription fee could be profitable, is beyond me , ms only does it because it’s one of the biggest companies in the world and their console bombed this generation. And don’t tell me Netflix does it because their original content is cheap af.



yvanjean said:
Manlytears said:

with all due respect, and trying not to appear arrogant ... You should moderate your words a little.
Demon's Souls is one of the most influential games of the past decade and the origin of all soulsborne games. It is not up to you to make the judgment about "what is stupid or not", so I suggest you show a little respect for the Playstation Fans.

I'm not calling Playstation fans, I think it's stupid to pay full price for a game that will immediately drop in price after release and that doesn't have a multiplayer component. 

If you're truly passionate about the game and can't wait for a price drop then just get it at full price. We are all gamers and we have all done it in the past. 
Sony, Microsoft, and all third parties love these passionate gamers. But, the smart move is to pick up a great game at a great price.

Demon Souls is not a smart investment, so paying $69.99 for a game that you can get for less than $39.99 just a few months down the road is kinda stupid. I have never played Demon Souls, so I really look forward to playing it for cheap. 


If you want to support bluepoint games or the soulslike genre and it's one of the genres you love much then there aint nothing stupid about buying them at full price.

I always feel inclined to support whoever does try their best to give the consumer a good experience without much bullshit involved, but i think you mean that it is stupid for yourself to make such a purchase and that is alright although you cannot really use that fact in a reflective way against a whole fanbase.



yvanjean said:

My bad I should have said Remastered/Remake games are a quick cash grab and Sony cash cow.

You are not making a new game from the grounds up and spending hours on level design, Story, Mechanics, Etc.

You are spending about 15-30% of the original budget to Remaster/Remake and slap on a $69.99 price tag on it. 

More power to Sony if people are stupid enough to drop $69.99 on a remake more power to them, smart business. I can benefit after they are done playing with it and pick it up in the bargain bins or they drop the digital price a few months down the road.

yea, I highly doubt that

the big manhours (= big money) of AAA development go into art, asset and animation creation and those are all new for the remake

another big part of the budget is creating the tech (if inhouse tech is used), because the people doing that are much better paid on average than the art team

and then there is marketing costs, which can be absurdly high for AAA games (even much higher than the dev costs itself)