Sony PlayStation cross-platform game strategy

[Tkumpathenurple]

It doesn't make sense if you're wanting to incentivise people to buy into your platform where you make 30% of the revenue of all other sales.

Sony's short term thinking is baffling. Most other games made sense: there was at least a PS4 version. But SM2? They're sending the message that even their meager amount of first party PS5 exclusives aren't exclusive. The market leader is trying to turn themselves into Sega.

Can't possibly imagine why PS5 sold below expectations last year...

 

[chris1515]

It doesn't make sense if you're wanting to incentivise people to buy into your platform where you make 30% of the revenue of all other sales.

Sony's short term thinking is baffling. Most other games made sense: there was at least a PS4 version. But SM2? They're sending the message that even their meager amount of first party PS5 exclusives aren't exclusive. The market leader is trying to turn themselves into Sega.

Can't possibly imagine why PS5 sold below expectations last year...

Since the Insomniac leak there is a full alpha build leaked and modder use it. This video is from April 2024...

Inside the same Insomniac leak they wanted to launch Spiderman 2 on PC November 2025. They decided this is better to launch earlier...

The strategy is not the same depending of the title. Demon's Soul's Remake release 4 years ago and nothing about a port, Same for GT 7. TLOU Part 2 Remasterd will only release next year for the next HBO TLOU season.

Some remaster/remake like Horizon Zero Dawn or Until Dawn Remake release day one. Ghost of Yotei will probably release two years later...

 

[Charlietus]

Since the Insomniac leak there is a full alpha build leaked and modder use it. This video is from April 2024...

Inside the same Insomniac leak they wanted to launch Spiderman 2 on PC November 2025. They decided this is better to launch earlier...

The strategy is not the same depending of the title. Demon's Soul's Remake release 4 years ago and nothing about a port, Same for GT 7. TLOU Part 2 Remasterd will only release next year for the next HBO TLOU season.

Some remaster/remake like Horizon Zero Dawn or Until Dawn Remake release day one. Ghost of Yotei will probably release two years later...

That leaked build could be a factor for it as well, I forgot it's existence.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

Since the Insomniac leak there is a full alpha build leaked and modder use it. This video is from April 2024...

Inside the same Insomniac leak they wanted to launch Spiderman 2 on PC November 2025. They decided this is better to launch earlier...

The strategy is not the same depending of the title. Demon's Soul's Remake release 4 years ago and nothing about a port, Same for GT 7. TLOU Part 2 Remasterd will only release next year for the next HBO TLOU season.

Some remaster/remake like Horizon Zero Dawn or Until Dawn Remake release day one. Ghost of Yotei will probably release two years later...

Good point. As @Charlietus said, that leak could be a factor.

TLOU Part 2 releasing makes sense, as it's available on the PS4. Same with Horizon Zero Dawn or Until Dawn. Sure, the exact, updated/remade versions aren't, but the difference isn't night and day between versions.

They really need to continue to keep Demon's Souls, GT7, and Ghost of Yotei (and hopefully more) actually exclusive until the launch of the PS6. In a saturated entertainment market, people can wait a year or two - they're less inclined to wait an entire generation.

They're pissing away their lead for some occasional slight bumps to quarterly profits.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Can't possibly imagine why PS5 sold below expectations last year...

Because its price increased during a cost-of-living crisis? Sony's thinking might be, "we've reached hardware saturation at this price point, can't make cheaper hardware to sell more, and there's all these PC's out there that aren't going to buy a console no matter what we do." Which strikes me as very sensible. At which point the maximised revenue per software creation will come with going cross platform as holding out to drive hardware sales will fail due to unavoidable price of entry.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

True, that price increase will have had an impact.

But is that due to increased manufacturing costs or more short term thinking in the form of a desire to increase profit per unit? The PS5 was at breakeven something like a year after release, and GDDR6 and NAND prices have fallen since. Did everything else get more expensive? Have currency exchanges become so much more volatile?

I would normally assume it was manufacturing costs/currency exchanges were it not for the fact that SIE has been dominated by short term thinking from the moment Jim Ryan took over.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Both I dare say. But loss-leading hardware is potentially just throwing money away rather than being short-term thinking, particularly later into a console generation. Consumers unwilling to spend >$300 contemporary dollars on a console are probably less likely to spend on software and subscriptions, and so securing their custom with lossy hardware doesn't net a profit. When you could sell these people a $150 with one game and bank $40, say, they were worth selling to, but spending $100+ to secure them, they just aren't weren't bothering with.

The argument against Sony's pricing would need to spell out the value of these potential customers, and I'm guessing Sony's metrics paint a clear picture guiding their choices.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

I agree that loss leading isn't the move, particularly so far into the generation. I'm just not so sure if leaving the price the same would have been loss leading, but I suppose we're limited in this discussion by a lack of data.
If costs went up to the point of the console not being profitable, then I agree that the price for customers needed to reflect that. But if it only diminished profit per unit, I think it was a poor choice and will cost them more in the long term.

If it's not possible to cost reduce the PS5 hardware, they should've gotten an architecturally matched PS4 released with an SSD and optional disc drive compatibility - call it PSTV2 and when a PS5 game gets ported to PC, also port it to said device.

I do just find Sony's approach with PlayStation to be, in some ways, rudderless and lacking vision. Taking PS4 games such as Until Dawn and releasing a shinier version simultaneously on PC+PS5 is easy money, and they should keep doing so. They're steadily getting PS1/2/P/Vita games running on an emulator and available to buy - great, keep doing that too.

Bringing PS3 games to PC+PS5 with a simultaneous release would be a major win, but crickets.

Stating they "believe in generations" only to immediately demonstrate the opposite, followed by releasing some of their high profile exclusives on a competing platform during a generation in which they don't have very many high profile exclusives? Lunacy.

They seem to be treating their exclusives like they all need to sell like Spider-Man 2018 which just isn't the case. They only need to cover their own costs, so they can create an enticing suite of exclusive content, so that people will buy into the platform, so PlayStation gets a 30% cut from millions of people playing phenomenons such as Fortnite.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There should be a correlation in the finances between units sold and profit margins if Sony are sitting on fat margins. At launch and a roughly break-even price, operating profit would be down from zero profit from hardware. A few years later and 10 million units with $100+ profit would be a huge increase on operating profit. That's not what we're seeing with Sony's operating income reducing since 2020.

 

[Nesh]

They're steadily getting PS1/2/P/Vita games running on an emulator and available to buy - great, keep doing that too.

Wait...
They have PSP and Vita games running on PS5??? When did that happen?

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

There should be a correlation in the finances between units sold and profit margins if Sony are sitting on fat margins. At launch and a roughly break-even price, operating profit would be down from zero profit from hardware. A few years later and 10 million units with $100+ profit would be a huge increase on operating profit. That's not what we're seeing with Sony's operating income reducing since 2020.

Good point. Do you know of a good place to look for those figures? No worries if not, but it'd save me from faffing and searching.

A *very* brief bit of Googling showed that as of March 2023, their revenue had grown but they were expecting it to fall in the coming year.

Wait...
They have PSP and Vita games running on PS5??? When did that happen?

I might be wrong in terms of the Vita, and maybe I'm just thinking of actual ports such as Dragon's Crown. But there are definitely PSP games on there - Killzone Liberation springs to mind.

It seems to only be a slow trickle, and they tend to be announced as included with PS+Premium, but you can buy them without the subscription. I'm pretty sure they're a uniform price of ~£8 here IIRC.

Of all the old games though, I really want Onimusha 2+3. I bought the PS4 port of the first and loved it, but its sequels haven't followed

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Slide from Sony presentation: https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/business_segment_meeting/pdf/2024/GNS_E.pdf