If Sony want to publish and sell more family friendly games (Ratchet, Astro, etc), they need to sell on Nintendo.
If Sony want to publish and sell more games in Japan, it needs to sell on Nintendo.

China, a huge market potential, is 99% PC and Mobile gaming. If Sony wants to sell more in China it needs at least to increase games going to PC.

Xbox though? Xbox has conditioned its players to play GamePass. I don't think people buying games will increase anytime soon on Xbox. Not sure it warrants the effort of porting and continued support of those ports.

You're only re-inforcing what we already know; not only do gamers on Xbox not want to buy games, gamers don't want to buy Xbox period. That's why the platform is dead and they're maneuvering themselves into the newly emerging user-friendly PC market, hoping that people who just want already setup smaller form-factor PCs will still consider having Xbox/Gamepass in their room too.

Of course this newfound strategy for Microsoft gaming will likely look terribly redundant once Steam OS has a full release with partnered brands. The gaming community that have been waiting to free themselves from Windows will have a more desirable alternative, while console gamers that are scared to assemble lego pieces will have a simple ready-made option.

For Microsoft to make their 'Xbox device' but more importantly Gamepass and Windows still desirable, they will likely have to make some big deals to attract/keep customers. Don't be surprised if not only PS first-party games are native on Xbox marketplace by then, but might even have some day one Gamepass deals.

I just looked it up. Not sure where I heard the 800 million number but apparently a lot of gaming news outlets were misreporting the dev costs of the game. Thanks for the correction. 

Shinobi has said this job listing has been overblown.

It reminds me of Sony becoming "increasingly multiplatform" last year and that we'd have Day and Date ports by now lol.

I think it's a case of Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, Insomniac, Santa Monica, and Sucker Punch being vestigial to Sony at this point. If they make high-selling games, then Sony is happy with that. If they don't, then Sony gives them the axe without any attempt to fix the studio and moves on. Similar to what is happening to Bend Studio or what MS did to the Forza Motorsport team. Hopefully, these teams will remain stable for another decade, but if they enter troubled waters, Sony won't be as likely to come to their rescue as they would have in the past. Geurilla started as a mediocre studio and was slowly built up into a fantastic studio over 12 years. I don't think Sony has that kind of commitment to quality games anymore. Basically, 2025 Sony has the same blasé approach to making good games as MS. They just happen to have better homegrown studios than MS. Those studios are left over from the PS1-PS4 days when they actually cared. 

Since when is playtime more important than sales numbers? 

That doesn't make much sense. If revenue is even 1% higher than production costs you have made a profit. I'm assuming that in the movie industry they count revenue as ticket sales revenue and then movie theaters or distributers take a bunch of that money before the movie in question sees it. But with games being mostly digital these days and with 1st party games not having to pay a 30% royalty tax none of that logic should effect 1st party videogames. 

This is the problem as someone else pointed out. Without Playstation Sony is just this Bethesda-sized publisher in MS/Actiblizz's ocean. This is why I think it's suicide of them to go 3rd party. It's as awful a business decision as when Sega surprised-launched the Saturn in the USA. 

Up until a few days ago I would have disagreed with this. But yeah I wouldn't be surprised if Xbox offered Sony a giant check to go 3rd party and put their games on gamepass. 

I think Sony is just scared of having to release PS6 while Trump is still president and then he hits them with "200% tariffs from all things from China and they are reciprocal tariffs and I'm the best president evar in the history of the world even better than Washington, also order me some Mcdonalds!". So something like 40% of their customers either can't buy a PS6 or Sony has to lose $300 or more on each console sold. So they are rapidly trying to go 3rd party. Either that or Sony's execs are insane. I can't decide which. 

The way Sony has dropped their software prices this generation has changed considerably. They are not Nintendo, but they are certainly selling more games at higher prices, as shown in the Insomniac leak. 

Sony first party sales account for 15/20% of their overall game sales in any given year. That figure doesn't include PC ports which are included in the others category for financial reports. They also have their back catalog leading engagement metrics for their premium tier which generates billions in revenue. And where exactly are their first party profits being destroyed by GAAS? Something like MLB releases every year. Marvel Tokon looks to be the next big fighting game. Gran Turismo 7 is still charting. Even Destiny Rising is looking to be a promising venture for Sony in the mobile space with 5M+ registered players. 

Exclusives don't need to dominate play time to drive console sales. We've seen tentpole titles drive hardware sales for every platform. And even the article you cite is for one month where Sony had no releases. SpiderMan 2 for instance was in the top 10 most played for the PlayStation charts in NA from its release to the end of 2023. Even God of War Ragnarok hit the top 10 when its free DLC released back in Dec 2023. 

I disagree, strongly, specially on even trying to compare it to MS.

Bend's last game was in 2019, Sony was not happy with the game critic reception but it made them good money, and Sony was ok with a Days Gone sequel, Bend itself did not want to do it. Bend was also pretty much just a support studio before that and was still live. They also had their live service game cancelled and are still there.

Here comes a big thing about Sony, they give their studios a really huge trust vote and let them do mostly what them want, they will intervene when it starts going wrong, and that was exactly what killed Japan Studios foe example, so many years and different projects and no direction or organization.

They should not have closed it, but it took many years to do so. You had Ueda sitting on The Last Guardian for years with Team Ico and even after leaving the company Sony still wanted that game released, never cancelled it.

Team Asobi was the team saved from Japan Studios and would you look at that, they got a platformer to win the overall GOTY, even on TGA, something Mario couldn't, Astro is one of their newest IP and it was it's first "proper game". Did you listen to how passionate that team speech was when winning the GOTY?

Polyphony Digital will spend years developing and supporting their next Gran Turismo and there is no axe coming for them. The end result is superb as well.

You have Media Molecule, their last game was in 2020 and a failure, yet the studio is still there, doing who knows what, but still there.

Even Santa Monica, after 2013 with God of War Ascension being the franchise's lowest point, and their next Sci-Fi IP being cancelled before even being formally announced, Sony still invested as much on them to go back to God of War and reinvent it.

Sony cares a lot for their studios, layoffs are happening and this is really sad as this time the reason was a company wide focus on their massive greedy ambition of having forever games, yes, and the brand is suffering from it, sadly the good people working there too, but even with all that, you have Intergalactic, Wolverine, Saros, Yotei coming, just had Death Stranding 2, and all games keep coming with a lot of support from them, they get dedicated shows, controllers, console faceplates, etc, and keep being high quality and selling great.

It feels disingenuous to even compare it to how MS is doing things for a long time now.

Even with all their problems, result from their bad choices, the games are great, sell great, and keep being some of the most relevant out there, we just got less of them for a few years. I see no push in the contrary direction whatsoever.