What should Sony's Acquisition Plans Be? *spawn*

If anything, you’re clearly the most emotionally affected by this. Most here are just trying to have a conversation. You keep turning this into boring console war talks.

 

They could start with Trojan horse.

Like... Every purchase on ps pc store provide the same game license on steam.

After it got popular, they stop offering this dual license.

Like what EA did. Their older games have dual cross buy license between origin and steam. IIRC if you buy on steam, you got origin for free

 

But didn't EA eventually come back to Steam in some form (you still need a launcher)?

 

It seems to me that Sony does more with less. They dont have the resources like MS does or the amount of studios, but what they do alot with what they have. For example is the PC ports, they do them better then MS themselfs currently. I'd expect that to be the other way around...
Small(er) teams outputting behemoths of games (GoW, HZD last of us, uncharted etc), guess that what sony needs to do is.... continue with what their doing, maybe even doubling down on that, expand those studios to ensure more AAA's per year. The PS2 roots..... Cod is a huge one, but what if the next GTA is exclusive to PS5 for a year? If thats possible these days anyway.

 

They confirmed it was simply generic assets from what they had picked up from an asset store. However I can't find the tweet/posts about that from the time it happened.

 

Yea, going to agree here. Truthfully it’s hard to predict Sonys moves generally because they’ve been so secretive and they don’t really talk about their long term strategy; if it is to make a game pass equivalent, buying up all the smaller independents makes the most sense.

 

I'm not convinced of that. Do the titles they'd deliver really drive substantial subscriber growth?

 

From a business perspective I believe so. If you fight over existing IPs you’re only really fighting over the same pie if available players. If you vastly expand the type of games made to appeal to larger and wider audiences, more niche ones etc, you grow the pie.

Cod doesn’t attract more players each year, break out games at this moment are a lot of F2P games, battle royale etc. COD et al. have a sizeable market share of purchased titles, but there’s a lot of market that doesn’t care for CoD.

 

Why are we taking just about CoD? Its a huge selection of IPs that went under the control of their competitor. The Playstation frunchise got its strength from the fact that you could find pretty much almost every third party IP and its own first and second party exclusives.
MS's acquisitions have not ended yet. The brand is losing support not because of its way its performing in the market. Its losing the companies that were suporting it because someone else is buying them.
And from history we know that a console's success is never dependent solely on the games it gets from its own studios. That was never enough. Every console that did not have full support from the big developers were underperforming in the market.

Sony will have to find new ways to deal with this

 

Seems I am nearly alone on this one. I don't think Sony has any need to go buy some big publisher. Even after the acquisition Sony will still be a larger publisher than MS and those exclusive titles are heavily concentrated on the console side. They have plenty of IP and continue to come up with a broad range of substantial new hits every generation. They have continued to expand their studio count with minor acquisitions of companies they already know well. Their developers are generally considered high quality (maybe second only to Nintendo). They have serious goodwill amongst the gaming community (I'm not going to debate how they did that or whether it is deserved, for this discussion it is true and that is all that is relevant). Smaller acquisitions are certainly within their grasp if they desire.

If you asked me, and I know no one did, they need to shift their business model somewhat. They have been quiet on their cloud plans for the future and this is something I would like to hear more about. They could release their titles, eventually, day and date on the PC through their own store (so they can keep the 30%) or even cut a deal with Epyc who are already taking less ( whom they already have a vested interest in). That would move the needle a bit for me at least. Plenty of future ways to get people into their system. MS already expect Sony to have a subscription service sooner rather than later. That will be a shift for them, but it is a shift we have seen in every other medium. Companies should have a good path already mapped out to manage that transition. I just don't see any reason Sony cannot retain/ carve themselves out a nice chunk of the market, in the fashion of Nintendo but with more 3rd party support.

Losing COD may hurt them a bit, but it certainly isn't going to kill them. Even if MS isn't done yet, what is the realistic worst case scenario? They are not going to lose long term access to the sports titles or major 3rd party IP's (By this I mean something like Marvel, Star Wars, DC, etc - licensed properties). The controlling companies involved appear to be less and less interested in long term exclusivity deals, single games are probably a different story. Worst case I can think of, Take2 and Ubisoft get acquired. That would be what? Another $50B ? No more Rockstar or Assassin's Creed. I highly doubt this happens for several reasons. Especially in light of Take2's own recent acquisition. But assume it does for the sake of argument. Sony loses a bunch of the middle ground but ends up what? In the position of MS last gen only not actually losing money? I doubt it would even get that far. They will be fine. They have a lot more driving IP than MS did last gen to sustain their future. Lost stock price and lost market share has happened before and will happen again. Barring MS leaving gaming they were unlikely to continue their last gen dominance at that rate. It just isn't sustainable with direct competitors around.

This of course does not include something like acquiring Disney. If that were to happen, and MS took the IP exclusive, that is a different story entirely. Anyway. Sony may be diminished, but they aren't going anywhere.

 

Games from 3rd party devs that release cross-platform because they want to maximise their money and haven't much to gain by limiting their content to one platform, by and large. Starfield would have come to PS if MS didn't buy Bethesda - it was inevitable; they wouldn't exclude a potential millions of sales(unless moneyhatted). Now we'll just wait and see.

Paid for exclusives is a different topic to studio buyouts.

No. That's not the argument that was written. You presented confusion over why reactions are different to Sony acquisitions over MS. I've tried to explain, giving a great, simple reference, "check the release history of the studio and see if they were releasing multiplat titles or not." This would apply to any hardware vendor securing talent - if they are buying up studios that have a solid history of being multiplat developers, that means those studio no longer being multiplat, which is qualitatively different to buying a studio that hasn't been multiplat for 15+ years.

The discussion about securing second-party exclusives is different to studio buyouts, although similar, because a company paying for a unique exclusive isn't as bad as a company paying to make an existing multplatform IP exclusive as there's nothing removed from the other platform in the former case.

And before you try to extend another platform-bias, "I'm unfair" argument to my discussion, I'm against platform exclusives full stop. We're at a point now where the boxes don't matter and there's no reason locking content to a specific piece of hardware. Disney buying studios and requiring a subscription is one thing, but if they then decided you need to buy a Disney TV to watch them, that'd be bollocks. That's what we have with consoles now. It's an evolution of what consoles were based on, which they had to be back then with diverse hardware but the market has changed, the hardware has changed, and now it makes no sense. Gamers should be required to get a box, and on that should be able to run whatever games and services they choose (as appropriate to the performance level of their hardware). They shouldn't need a Netblox device to play Netblox games, only a Nebflox sub or to buy games from Netblox on their existing suitable device. Likewise, if they have a machine capable of running Netblox and Plisney+, they shouldn't need a different Plisney+ box to play Plisney+ games, just the subscription or buy from them. Any moves to use software to force people into buying environmentally significant hardware are wrong IMHO. We don't tolerate it in any other media, and now software is suitably abstracted from the hardware, it makes little sense to tolerate it for games too.

Against that personal opinion backdrop, it's very obvious that Sony buying Housemarque is not the same as MS buying ID Software, let alone the entirety of AB, unless MS don't produce any platform exclusives and don't use this acquired software advantage to leverage users into buying their hardware.

 

COD is surely the only one to really impact Sony here. The remaining major IPs are typically PC centric/only so I’m not particularly seeing those as being a threat to Sony dominance unless they are trying to dominate the PC space as well.

But I agree that losing 3P titles hurt. I recall very distinctly we had a major discussion around what was more important, 3P or exclusives, and the argument was overwhelming towards exclusives being the most important; the counter argument being that 3P is the most important.

With the way things have gone here, looking back at the arguments poised and what has occurred here, not really quite sure who was more correct. It does appear exclusives are more important, but only when the most important 3P titles go exclusive?

 

Collectively losing those IPs is big damage. Plus all the games that the company would have offered in the future

 

I don’t think AB was on any track to release anything from Blizzard’s or sierras line of games. They pulled the Tony Hawk team as well. They had no plans for Diablo, WoW, OW2. It’s all bad there because they wanted to make massive billionaire dollar games, and these are pretty niche PC centric titles.

there was no path for AB here and that’s why they shopped around to get bought.
I don’t think Sony really lost anything of value except COD, as AB was clearly not on any path to making anything else.

anyone truly following blizzard has seen a dramatic decline, year over year, blizzcon after blizzcon, GSL after GSL.
StarCraft dead, Warcraft dead, heroes of the storm dead. Diablo was dead, it went mobile but the outrage made them start D4. Project titan dead, ghost dead, Warcraft adventures dead, Wow is dead, so it was rebooted. OW2 is massively delayed. War3 reforged pure garbage. StarCraft remastered garbage.

Fucking horse shit I’m upset just writing this out.

 

Microsoft has been buying up game companies since the '90s and here we are. People move around, new IP is created. Corporate overlords bypassed. lol

 

Subs models and associated store accounts make it a somewhat different scenario. Can customers signed up to Gamepass /MS stores be arsed with another service? That's what big tech is always reaching for. Enough laziness to keep people locked in.

 

The problem was that PS was big enough and Xbox was small enough for a lot of third parties skipping Xbox but releasing everything on Playstation. And it reached the point where the Playstation community got a feeling that they were entitled to all the games.

Not really. Basically if you pay for time / permanent exclusivity long enough if it were to be acquired people say that it is just a normal thing even if it were a third party. It is just cheaper approach. Sony is smart in spending money and if in the previous gen Sony decided to buy Atlus or Yakuza studio, people would praise it saying that "they made the games for Sony only anyway".

Third party deals prevent the studio from releasing the games on other platforms and if it lasts long enough and ends with acquisition - it becomes "the organic growth". I personally never separated these things, because Sony did not spend money on acquisition knowing full well it would get all the games on their platform. It is smart to be honest. They dont even need to acquire Square Enix if they can just pay for getting FF mainline exclusives.

Because TV/movie market is very different from gaming market - it has too many platforms. TV platforms, online streaming and so on.

Anyway, it is off topic.

 

You keep the console war talk dont you? Is that what it is about? The Playstation community? You think thats what we are discussing? You make yourself appear like a bitter XBOX fan rather as someone discussing objectively the subject as @Shifty Geezer and many others do

 

The whole discussion basically boils down to personal bias regarding how you would justify acquisition/moneyhat/third-party deal, which one is more organic/not-organic etc. and it has no relation to the topic regarding what Sony should do next. Don't want to discuss it anymore.

 

You are projecting yourself on others