Yeah, I highly doubt games cost $120 million to make. Especially with relatively small PS teams of 100 people. Only ND, SSM and GG have 200-300 people.
Over 1500-2000 people work on Sony's AAA games released on PS4 and PS5. Even games like Sackboy. The 100-200 people of the lead development studio is only a small part of them, not even a 10%. And developments last typically from 3 to 7 years, and average of 4 or 5.
This means that many of these PS4 & PS5 games (same goes for similar AAA games from other companie) had a development budget of over $120 million. And then you also have to consider marketing, that traditionally is around half of the cost of the total project (so around a total $250M budget for a game with a $120M gamedev budget).
You can go to mobygames.com to check out how many people appear on the credits of a game, and then to check out in wikipedia their development time. You'll get an idea if a game required more work/budget than other ones, or to compare it against games that publicly stated their total or gamedev budget.
Most AAA games cost over 100M (recently Jim Ryan said it was the case for their games), and the big ones over 200M.
This is why Microsoft purchased Zenimax and Sony didn't. Sony can't afford to play in the game that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google play in.
Sony doesn't make these kind of acquisitions because they don't need it, they could afford it. They don't need it because unlike MS, they already are super successful with their existing teams.
Every year Sony breaks several gaming history records. Their first party games ell better than ever, dominate the GOTY awards and their consoles sell in a record breaking pace, and thanks to that insane install base they get a fuck ton of money from 3rd party game/DLC/MTX/subscription sales.
To get some perspective, over 1500 million games have been sold for PS4, and if we're generous and estimate Zenimax sold 50M games on PS4, then that's not even 5% of the games sold on their platorm, which is the main Sony revenue source but not the only one. So they don't need to make this kind of purchases and won't miss Zenimax.
Shawn has no clue how these service works. Just because you are in charge of something, doesnt mean you know everything about it.
We arent in the past anymore. These services dont only have subs fees as a revenue. There is the MTX, Dlcs, and game sales. When a service does all 3 of them, plus the subs fees, you are getting more revenue, and not bound by sub count at all.
People need to understand this point. Netflix doesn't have those 3 extra revenue like games have. You arent getting extra content for you movies. You arent buying movies from Netflix. You arent buying songs from Netflix.. You are only paying for sub fees. So people compare it to game services. which these service has those, and netflix doesnt.
EA got billions from fifa mtx alone. Think how much gamepass or any other servce that allows will get it from. Especially when they have tons of games on the service. Gamepass has 475+ games. How many dlc, mtx, and game sales does it do monthly or yearly?
Gamepass and Netflix aren't profitable. PS Now+PS Plus are. So Shawn's team made a profitable Gamepass before Gamepass ever existed, he may know something about it.
And Sony gets way more DLC & MTX from FIFA and most top multiplatform games because PS4 is by far their platform with the biggest amount of players playing on them.
To add old games to PS Plus and PS Now that already sold their units and basically made their entire sales cycle is cheap for Sony and profitable for both Sony and the publisher.
To almost give away to millions of people (and this is not considering most of them not paying the full subscription due to $1 deal, free trials or cd key stores btw) several games per year that cost over a hundred million dollars plus paying several 3rd parties per month to do the same, plus paying the server costs and so on of all this stuff can't be profitable at all unless subscriptions go up to hundreds of millions. Even if you include the small part of the DLC+MTX that these games do on Xbox (they mostly pay it on PS).
Shawn is right. MS does it as a desperate move to get some attention to try to increase their userbase and to have some nice gaming metric (Gamepasss MAU) to brag about. But unless this huge gamble ends working in the very long term, until then will be basically to throw money to the garbage bin.
I’m not good at math and I’m not going to pretend I know how business works ( unlike most comments here ) but Shawn Layden was in charge of PlayStation and PS Now, maybe he has a more inside view of what really happens, deals etc.
Let me point out that Shawn and Jim have are totally opposed views on the gaming industry . Everyone can notice the clear difference when Jim because the boss.
with that said, just because Shawn doesn’t seem the service will be sustainable doesn’t mean Jim will have the same opinion.
Also most of the comments here are defending something without truly knowing how the future will turn. I say let’s chill and see.
Both Shawn and Jim know the numbers, know the difference between Gamepass and PS Now and this is why they agree in the same opinion: to put old games on PS Now it's dirt cheap doesn't affect its sales and is profitable because they were already dead games generating basically zero revenue, so something is better than zero. To put brand new AAA games on Gamepass is super expensive, negatively affects its sales and isn't profitable.
Sony already runs their business with a very profitable strategy. To switch their super successful, record breaking strategy to the unprofitable Gamepass one would kill their business, so they don't like it.
www.gamespot.com
www.gamesindustry.biz
finance.yahoo.com
