More Sony first-party PlayStation games coming to PC

Yup. Even a 2060 is still above £500 - that’s British Pounds so that’s something like $700. For a 2060!?

 

I appreciate that you want to see Sony improve on PSNow, but you're totally missing what I'm asking..."why?" - from a business perspective.

GP is better, but it's losing money.

Is GP the future of gaming? That's open to debate.

Do Sony have something in the works? Maybe, pretty sure I read something fairly recently.

Don't also forget that PSNow is half the cost of GP...so not sure if Sony can match or better GP (which already loses money) for half the cost, so no doubt if they offer a PSNow+ it will be more money and then everyone will complain about the costs!

 

I know, I can't believe I managed to snag a 2060s for my son just before Christmas @ £230! Madness...I should have bought 10 from eBay as they were around £300 at the time! lol

 

Prices are crazy. I wonder if sony and MS will be forced to update their price.

 

PS5 and XSX are good value this time no shitty Jaguar CPU and the NVME SSD.

 

Maybe I'm a bit too much of an idealist, but I see no issues with both Sony and Microsoft performing some game sharing between the machines.

I think it'd be cool and make some financial sense if say Sony released The Last of Us 1 on Xbox around the time The Last of Us 2 came out. Providing Microsoft offered a similar solution (Maybe Halo 5 When Halo Infinite is released).

If drives more people to be interested in those franchises and to the platforms.

 

Im in EU aswell (sweden) and yes thats absolutely true, PC gaming is more expensive like it always has been. You'd pay more then twice the money for the same performance as PS5 most likely.
I wasnt ever debating the price/performance ratio as thats usually much better for the consoles around launch time.

I have to add though, it all depends on what kind of preferences one has. My ps5 is only being used for gaming, nothing more, whilest my 2080ti pc is being used for basically everything else aside of gaming aswell. The pc usually is getting the best versions of multiplat games aswell (graphically), in special considering ray tracing and higher settings, resolutions and framerates.
Might totally not be worth it for someone else but, for me it is.

I still 'need' the PS5 though, otherwise i'd miss out on demon souls, forbidden west (dont want to wait years to play it), the new GoW, rift apart, GT and many other titles that might come late or never to the PC. Dual sense might also be a factor if well implemented. Portability has taken a hit with the PS5's size, but it still smaller and lighter then my main gaming pc.
I probably wouldnt see a need for a PS anymore if all the exclusives made it to pc.

Also, its (almost) impossible to get a PS5 right now for the ones that never got one before, same for the GPUs. Both PS5 and GPUs are way overpriced if you are able to get one from either scalpers or second hand etc. Another thing, i can upgrade parts (like the GPU or ssd) down the line if needed, instead of getting a new system in case of a mid gen refresh.

Anyway, price to performance ratio wasnt something ive been claiming to be an advantage to the pc or anything close to that. That will happen in some years whenever say a RTX4050 is going to offer better performance at low(er) prices (same for other components).

 

yes it's all a question of priorities / budget
i'm 41 and only game maybe 5 hours a week now, back in time when i was 15-20 i would play maybe 4 hours a day, PC might have been a better choice then , though in that period i was litterally buying every console ! Even had a PC with a Geforce ! (5200 IIRC) I only stopped at the 360 release.
Now my PC is only used for internet, mails etc... a netbook is more than enough.
Consoles are still easier to use even today.

other spendings now too, other priorities ! (next month 4 new tires --> 600+€ !)

But for best versions of games, if budget is not a problem, PC have always been the best place since the coming of 3d cards.

 

If you think about it, it's pretty impressive. 17% of all software sales are first party, but that's actually a lot. Think about the release schedules of most high sales games on Playstation. COD, Madden, Fifa, stuff like that is usually in the top of the lists every year. Those are yearly releases. Skim though a list of 1st party published games and check the recent PS4 years and you will see that there are like 6-10 first party releases (excluding digital only and VR games that would be represented in those categories in the charts we are discussing), and plenty of them are smaller releases like Dreams or the Wipeout collection. Great games, just not titles that are ever going to set the world on fire, sales wise. 2019 was a pretty lackluster year I would say as well. Only 6 releases with the big hits being Death Stranding and Days Gone.

The point is, if you are only releasing 2-3 big games a year, and you are competing every year with Madden, COD, and Fifa, that also come out every year, and non-stop sales juggernauts like GTAV (has it ever been out of the top 10?), I think anything in the 20% range is very respectable.

 

Not every sale is equal. Sony gets a lot more money from their 1st party games. Another thing is majority of money is made from initial expensive sales. The total sales number can be inflated as it could contain all the cheap discount sales as well. Looking at money made from 1st party games versus other games would be good metric to use.

 

Yes, they get more revenue from first party games but less profit when you factor in costs up until a certain point. Obviously taking the 30% of others' work is more profitable. So shouldn't this be looking at profit instead of revenue?

 

Profit would definitely be best.

 

I think miles morales sold something like 4.1million copies in first month or so. These are full price sales. One would have to sell awfully many 10$ discount games with 30% cut to reach similar profit. If only we knew revenue and profit instead of only how many sales transactions were done.

 

Though since this is the games industry, we will be hard pressed to find actual accounting statements from any company breaking out what we'd need for a meaningful discussion. Everything has to be so secretive and protected so as to not tip their hat or let their industrial secrets out.

 

Always. Revenue is very little use without knowing the margins. If I setup a business selling Ferraris for £30k per car I'll have massive revenues but I'll be losing £50k for each car sold. Whenever you see revenue without profit/loss, be suspicious. It is a financial slight-of-hand.

 

Or just have Fortnite's microtransactions. Apple made MORE THAN $100 million off Fortnite in 2 years and I don't believe they're the top platform. That's more than $4.16 Million a month with no effort required by them [Apple]. They listed Epic earned $700 Million, where if that's after the cut done by Apple then if it's a straight 30% then that's $300 Million to Apple. First Google Source: https://news.yahoo.com/apple-made-more-100-million-185252231.html

 

Makes a lot of sense to try to do micro transactions or "free to play". Though best market for these types of games is cross platform to gain as big audience as possible. Preferably also mobile in the mix.

One additional pattern I see is a lot of pay to play dlc. One can buy the base game cheaply from sale. Add dlc's and the price is near new game price and playing without dlc isn't compelling. Developers are good at trying to find ways to upsell instead of discount sell. Though I keep hearing most money is made from initial expensive sales and plain discount sales don't help developers that much. Some series playing the dlc upsell pattern are civ vi, crusader kings series etc. I think this is more prevalent in pc-world where gamers have learnt to wait for sale to minimize expense.

 

I've worked for a few companies where they took a couple of years to realize revenues / incoming customers isn't a gauge of how well the company is doing. Fortunately the last one realized this and turned things around, no longer engaging in nonprofitable business. The first year the revenue dipped but the profits climbed. Now many years later it's substantially better off and profitable for all the business brought in.

The worst and easiest way to unknowingly perpetrate this is when a company has sales teams that are driven by bonuses for revenue brought in. Naturally they'd promise the world to get customers in and have contracts signed that were pure money sinks. So much custom work had to be done. It always is depressing to see this happen.

To tie back a bit more to the topic... In the games industry I wonder how games are evaluated when you're releasing on next-gen only and your consumer base is a mere fraction of what the base is on last-gen market. It's part of the have to spend money to make money, but how is it valued by the financial folks inside the company? Is 1 next-gen game sale valued at 3 last-gen game sales? What is that trade off valued at?

 

Very good question. I hope someone has insight to share about this.

 

DLC and MTX are bigger than digital software sales + Physical software sales at least in revenue.