"Sony’s Obsession With Blockbusters Is Stirring Unrest Within PlayStation Empire"
I just find this topic absolutely laughable. So you are trying to tell me that it's somehow a bad thing that they want to give more attention to triple-A games?? In what way is this somehow bad news?? Do people think that Sony is somehow gonna suddenly stop allowing smaller games for the PS5? Really?
When you shoot for blockbuster-or-nothing, everything that just does "well" or that is good for certain people, all that stuff that isn't a blockbuster get shitcanned.
A million or a hundred million dollars is not worth bothering with when a corporation is trying to make billions of dollars.
When that's the mindset of the business, you end up with the kinds of products made to please every person on the planet, no matter what; you also end up with a whole lot of over-produced "flops" that either never caught on because it was targeted wrong/badly, or you have good games that still don't measure up to expectations and never see sequels (or even more sad, the creative team gets fired.) You do not get much experimentation, you do not get to explore options of variety, you do not get repeats of small successes.
If Sony was still interested in maintaining the balance of AAA and experimental/genre projects, then there would be nothing to worry about. And even if Sony leaves less-than-AAA production, there will be indies and mid-card producers making the games for the platform, so maybe that's no longer a business the platform holder should be in anyway? Maybe this will be the right direction moving forward. But Sony made great mid-tier and small-scale games (sometimes inside their AAA franchises, particularly when portables were a viable PlayStation market,) and they championed these novel titles as being part of the identity of a PlayStation fan. According to Schreier and visual evidence of recent PlayStation moves (though to be fair, there are also counters to that as well; Pixelopus for one probably isn't going to be making the next big thing, and Sony did launch a new console with the LBP brand being revisited on a smaller scale than usual, VR is also big-and-small in production,) the focus of PlayStation going forward is supposedly all blockbusters. And if that's true that it's the new way, there's never been a console manufacturer who has operated so single-mindedly as that...
Thing is, maybe this all-blockbusters approach
is the future?
Maybe Sony is making the smart choice? Maybe even the only choice to keep a business active for today's gamers? Other publishers have already gone heavy on AAA, if not exclusively AAA. Meanwhile, the Indie scene has risen up to meet some if not all of the market void. Who says a console maker needs to make
all these games? Movies already have transitioned away from the small-market titles in favor of the blockbuster franchises; it's easy to understand why every other movie is a superhero movie when everybody you know has seen every one of these superhero movies. Shouldn't game producers be using that strategy if it pays off so hugely? If everything the console manufacturer makes is big hits, doesn't that say something? Maybe having too many games and having some games be Japanese'y and other games be European'y and some games be dark and massive but other games be fluffy and little, maybe that confuses buyers these days? (Did Microsoft learn the hard way with Bleeding Edge, or is Grounded's under-the-radar success proof in the other direction? Or were both games a bad idea and they should have put every person on the payroll towards getting Halo Infinite to ship on time?) There is an argument to be made that AAA-only is the smart move, and maybe it is the only real way to succeed.
...But for fans of the quieter titles, this is a loss.
And PlayStation had a whole lot of titles that I love which wouldn't have existed if they had to be monsters to exist.