Wow, that output is dreadful. Not even one AAA flagship title? Like, 20 studios can't produce a couple of titles a year?
Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]
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Yeah, they said 'don't expect any additions to the biggest existing franchises within this financial year', so no more GoW, or LOU, etc. Kind of implies they are working on lots of new IP instead. Which would be nice.
It isn't us. Game quality and design is at an all time low.
The counter to that is expected reduced revenue, but maybe that's taking tent pole sales and thinking new IP won't sell as strongly? "Software sales - decrease". Which makes you wonder what they have in the pipeline and what their expectations are.
Hardware sales had visibly felt behind ps4 last quarter.
They are saying it is difficult to cost reduce (pricey die shrink at TSMC is available for almost two years...).
Software sales not pushing hardware because it takes forever to make it.
Software margins became razor thin despite rising game and subscription price. biggest part of software side are subscription ad DLC content.
If this vicious cycle is already outlook for industry champion then then AAA is over.
I was cheering for them because they were last big one doing custom engines, big bold single player games, little bit of different bespoke hardware/api and less of that service/engagement crap. I guess realities caught up even to the last one.
New suit already talking superficial multiplatform bullet points. Just like Microsoft they will quickly find out contraction in console sales and losing hardcore console high spenders group. Well Sony, I already have ryzen 7000 PC waiting for some reasonable GPU and Ragnarok on sale.
They are saying it is difficult to cost reduce (pricey die shrink at TSMC is available for almost two years...).
Software sales not pushing hardware because it takes forever to make it.
Software margins became razor thin despite rising game and subscription price. biggest part of software side are subscription ad DLC content.
If this vicious cycle is already outlook for industry champion then then AAA is over.
I was cheering for them because they were last big one doing custom engines, big bold single player games, little bit of different bespoke hardware/api and less of that service/engagement crap. I guess realities caught up even to the last one.
New suit already talking superficial multiplatform bullet points. Just like Microsoft they will quickly find out contraction in console sales and losing hardcore console high spenders group. Well Sony, I already have ryzen 7000 PC waiting for some reasonable GPU and Ragnarok on sale.
as DF staff said, the videogame industry has changed a lot. While in the PS2 era they commented on the fact that several games that defined a generation were launched in the first 3 to 4 years of that console generation.
Sony confirmed to have no plan to release a major franchise titles next FY (April 2024- March 2025) Sony
So DS2 will be in FY26www.resetera.com
No first party 'franchise' games in next fiscal year. Doesn't discount new IP, but there doesn't seem to be much happening there, either.
3rd party is really carrying the entire industry right now.
On a different note, there is also this news. I don't think this is true -can't read this news 'cos it switches to another IGN site in a different language:
PS5 Entering ‘The Latter Stage of Its Life Cycle’, Sony Says - IGN
After sales of the PlayStation 5 failed to meet expectations, Sony has said the console is entering “the latter stage of its life cycle.”
Not you. Easily the least exciting generation ever. Not that there aren't good games still getting made, but it's typically been despite the new consoles rather than because of them. And of course Nintendo.
Sony must be supremely grateful for the pandemic, because in no way has the PS5 earned the sales and momentum it has managed.
Could be a bad translation or something, but it still seems pretty terrible. Especially this bit:as DF staff said, the videogame industry has changed a lot. While in the PS2 era they commented on the fact that several games that defined a generation were launched in the first 3 to 4 years of that console generation.
On a different note, there is also this news. I don't think this is true -can't read this news 'cos it switches to another IGN site in a different language:
PS5 Entering ‘The Latter Stage of Its Life Cycle’, Sony Says - IGN
After sales of the PlayStation 5 failed to meet expectations, Sony has said the console is entering “the latter stage of its life cycle.”www.ign.com
“As such, we will put more emphasis on the balance between profitability and sales. For this reason, we expect the annual sales pace of PS5 hardware will start falling from the next fiscal year.”
This just feels like a completely different way of going about consoles. If sales fall, you drop prices, take the margin hit and make up for it because you've got millions more people that have bought your console and buying games on it that you take a healthy cut off of.
As for the comment about latter stage of its lifecycle, I suppose it could technically be true in the way they worded it. "Looking ahead, PS5 will be....", basically not yet, but it will be soon. Cuz yea, no way is the three year old PS5 in the second half of its lifecycle.
First this is more difficult now but they can't do drastic cut because of inflation. Consoles can resist to crisis but they can't take crisis and inflation at the same time...
People tend to forget that COVID was a first time the world just stopped for nearly 2 years. There was no correct response without looking hindsight, we navigated this slowly and with excess caution to ensure that the correct decisions were being made.
snc
Veteran
Imo pushing gaas affected Sony studios more than covid...
The pandemic 'crisis' was the best thing to happen to Playstation. And the whole 'inflation' arguments are very weak when we already know PS5 was making a profit(at least on the disc model) back in summer 2021 and they've made significant cost-cutting efforts since then. Playstation has become such a big profit stable for Sony lately and it's obvious they are getting greedier because of it.
The pandemic has become such a useful tool to deflect blame for corporations.
It was used as the excuse for basically every single game delay since early 2020, yet people ignore that like 80% of major games were already getting delayed before the pandemic even hit. Clearly a huge majority of those games would have suffered a delay regardless of Covid. Yet it was simply too convenient an excuse to not use.
It's also been a fantastic deflection to explain away 'raising prices', saying that Covid caused all this massive inflation, when it's been shown by now well enough that things like supply and distribution and costs were largely normalized quickly enough in most sectors, yet consumer pricing kept going up heavily on basically everything for a long time afterwards(and counting....). This idea that companies just HAVE to raise prices is betrayed heavily by how successful they've also conveniently been during this period of raised prices.... smh
LAZY DEVS ENJOYING THEIR MILLIONS IN THE BAHAMAS! OUTRAGEOUS!
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It was not sold at a loss at launch, but since then, every indication is that the cost to produce and just as importantly distribute each PS5 has steadily been increasing due to global economic conditions caused first by, IMO, improper response to the pandemic (we're going to be feeling the economic and educational impact of this for an entire generation of people) which led directly to global inflationary pressure. The too fast push for green energy (greatly increasing shipping costs) combined with the global economic impact of the war in Ukraine (food and energy inflation which puts pressure on other areas of various economies) aren't helping any either.
Basically Sony had to shrink the PS5 just to be able to maintain the increased post launch price point. If they hadn't shrunk the PS5, they likely would have had to increase the price of the PS5 another 50 USD or more to prevent it from being sold at a significant loss.
Regards,
SB
You mean their (non developers) bosses?LAZY DEVS ENJOYING THEIR MILLIONS IN THE BAHAMAS! OUTRAGEOUS!
If they had room to reduce prices and shift more units, why haven't they? They actually prefer to reduce forecasts rather than maintain historic growth? That seems backwards to me
As to the rest, please keep RSPC politics out of this. The whys and wherefores of inflation etc. aren't a topic for here. We can stop at whether Sony has price elasticity or not without the politics behind that, with reference to actual supporting evidence rather than heresay. eg. What are Sony's financials showing about hardware costs and profits versus other years?
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I get from your post that you believe that Sony and devs are having bigger profitability opportunities than before.
To some extend, yes companies do act against the consumer and find excuses.
But if Sony could increase software and hardware sales to maximize profits like they could in the PS1 and PS2 days I am sure that would have remained their current strategy. But they expect contraction of sales. If that's the result of them keeping margins high as an easy solution, thus making gamers less willing to buy, that's them sabotaging themselves. If that's the result of bigger challenges and changes in the nature of the industry, then it's inevitable
At this point I feel that a lot more are at play than simply Sony and the developers.
The production of software has become more complex.
A lot more companies involved in the production of goods and services are trying to increase profits at the expense of their clients which are other companies.
These added costs or strategy changes will reflect eventually at the final cost or utility that the consumers are paying for, as every company involved is trickling down their added margins on each other until it reach us.
I don't think Sony is getting huge margins from PS5 hardware. The manufacturing process between Slim and PS5 aren't significant. The days when consoles were highly simplified after 3-4 years from launch are gone. From the day Sony couldn't be the proprietary owner of their hardware anymore we saw a trend where the hardware doesn't get significantly simpler and cheaper to produce or sell. Hence there isn't much room to drop prices and attract even more people.
AMD need their profit margins too. That's something Sony didn't have to deal with in the PS1 and PS2 days. Therefore they keep prices higher to cover AMD's revenue
Well Sony are likely currently selling basically every PS5 they make without too much concern. They may not be flying off shelves the instant they arrive like they used to, but there's probably not a lot of worry of them sitting on shelves unable to be sold at all.
But really, they did use heavy discounts in the last six months or so of 2023 to push more sales as they cleared out all the OG models they could. They may not have quite hit the sky high sales expectations of internal forecasts, but sometimes such forecasts are also unreasonably optimistic(aka greedy) and the actual resulting sales were still very good for them as a result of this.
Yet now the new, notably cost-reduced version of the PS5 is sitting at higher prices again, and Sony are expecting lower sales as a result and they seem fine with this strategy. Why? Because I think it's become more important to them to be able to tout profit margins on their financials. Classic short-term over long-term thinking. It only seems like an obviously bad choice to us, but to bean counters(and look at who the new interim Playstation head is...), it can look very different. I'm sure they're betting that sales will stay high enough to justify all this, but it's still telling they seem fine with this only a few years in.
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