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PlayStation Sony President Hiroki Totoki Wants To Go Aggressive In Growth With 1st party Multi-Platform Releases

Famicrono said:
Apparently they are not happy with their overall direction?
It is not selling hardware and software as good as this new guy wants?
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More so what he saw when he took over PlayStation was that there was no clear direction and business goals that would result in tangible results/value

Couple that with the PS5 officially tracking below PS4 launch aligned and they are expecting to have a year that is pretty barren you can see the alarm bells going off when the console is only about to be entering its 4th year (traditionally one of the strongest years for Sony consoles I believe)

Game budgets are only increasing too so a lot is happening
 
AngryAlchemist said:
The problem is, I'm err ... playing all these on games on my PC and not on my PS5 ... lmao. I think the generation has gotten better, but consoles have just been getting worse.
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Yeah, at this point for a lot of people PC just makes sense as a primary device and Nintendo as a secondary device (or vice versa, like it is for me). Xbox has pretty much no exclusives on their own hardware at all and Sony's games are coming at a 1-2 year delay, which I am patient enough to wait for if I cared enough to play those games (might try the Horizons, Ratchet and Clank, and Stray sometime, once they go on a deep discount on Steam/GoG).
 
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N 2 Deep said:
More so what he saw when he took over PlayStation was that there was no clear direction and business goals that would result in tangible results/value

Couple that with the PS5 officially tracking below PS4 launch aligned and they are expecting to have a year that is pretty barren you can see the alarm bells going off when the console is only about to be entering its 4th year (traditionally one of the strongest years for Sony consoles I believe)

Game budgets are only increasing too so a lot is happening
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The market for Playstation/XBox consoles really isn't growing and hasn't for a while. The PS3 and XBox 360 sold like what? 170 million units combined?

This gen, maybe PS5 sells 110 million (looks like it's starting to trend below PS4) and XBox has collapsed entirely so I dunno where that even finishes at. 35 million?

The hardware is declining but the software costs are skyrocketing, some what not surprising then that even Sony now is looking to expand profit margins elsewhere.
 
PC gamers are becoming incredibly annoying nintendo do not give in. also I don't want to pay 5000 dollars for a single graphics card to stutter through a game 😭
AceBandage said:
Both Sony and Microsoft going third party. Soon, there will be only Nintendo.
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VTCgaV.gif
 
You know, when I think about it, once MLB The Show, the premiere baseball game, got forced to be multiplatform by MLB, that opened the floodgates to everything we are seeing now. It took a while, but now everyone is going, huh, we can make more money by putting our games on other consoles? Sign me up!
 
EvilChameleon said:
You know, when I think about it, once MLB The Show, the premiere baseball game, got forced to be multiplatform by MLB, that opened the floodgates to everything we are seeing now. It took a while, but now everyone is going, huh, we can make more money by putting our games on other consoles? Sign me up!
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The next level of growth. ‘What? Sales of our exclusive games we spend years developing have a hard cap of our own number of consoles sold? How can we keep selling more every year with these kind of restrictions!’
 
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I think diminishing returns on console sales are exactly why Nintendo is pivoting to IP-driven businesses like movies and theme parks. May not be for a couple of decades but eventually the console business might either die out or transform into something unrecognizable.
 
Even when the time comes for Nintendo to go PC, we all know it's going to be with their own storefront anyway. No way in hell will they let people buy their games on Steam/Epic/GOG; they'll just make a PC version of the Nintendo eShop.
 
Mekanos said:
I think diminishing returns on console sales are exactly why Nintendo is pivoting to IP-driven businesses like movies and theme parks. May not be for a couple of decades but eventually the console business might either die out or transform into something unrecognizable.
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Bingo

The branching out is being done very intentionally. I think Nintendo foresaw this happening with the market really early on and knew it was too risky to only remain in the dedicated console space. The thing is Nintendo is heavily reliant on believing their software is the reason their hardware sells so i can't see them going full on day and date PC releases (at least not in the next decade), but they might try to branch out with their mobile phone offerings on other devices
 
Ah, I knew there was something wrong with Sony’s PlayStation brand. It wasn’t an issue of lack of identity, but rather, lack of vision. Everything Sony has done has been grounded on the present and/or immediate future:
• More graphical intensive games: anyone with a finger in front of their face could have forecast the increase of costs years ago. Or maybe they did and decided to ignore it.
• Scarce 1st Party content: the PS5 released three years after the Switch. PlayStation had years to make adjustments to their teams to try and emulate a working strategy of a proper release and schedule.

At the end of the day, these exploitative assholes will just liquidate their corporate owner and either retire or become consultants and invoice thousands of dollars monthly. That’s why they could care less if a decision is damaging in the long run: their growth rates will ensure them their performance bonuses and call it a day.
 
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N 2 Deep said:
Bingo

The branching out is being done very intentionally. I think Nintendo foresaw this happening with the market really early on and knew it was too risky to only remain in the dedicated console space. The thing is Nintendo is heavily reliant on believing their software is the reason their hardware sells so i can't see them going full on day and date PC releases (at least not in the next decade), but they might try to branch out with their mobile phone offerings on other devices
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Hasn't it been like 4 years since they made a mobile game?
 
AceBandage said:
Hasn't it been like 4 years since they made a mobile game?
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Pokemon Go too stronk

But yeah they have slowed down the releases around the time they went bigger on movies/theme parks. By design I think, after the Mario Runner game most of their mobile games are GaaS
 
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Regulus Tera said:
And people doubted me when I said this was the end point for all console manufacturers. It’s a question of when, not if
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Regulus Tera said:
And it will happen to [Nintendo] too, is my point
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Eh, not that it could never happen, but it seems a tad erroneous to toss all of them together and use this as evidence for every case.

I've long found Xbox to be the most lacking in identity of the big three console manufacturers, so it didn't even seem wildly out of place that they might go multiplat, and Playstation has been trending that way. Beyong the trajectory of their gaming endeavors, their hardware has seemed tailored to facilitating the homogenity that easily allows this. I wasn't expecting them to go further toward this future so much so soon, but that might be down to not following things terribly closely the past number of years.

And that's the thing regarding Nintendo here: they've set their own direction differently for console generations now. Between cultivating their own identity through a strong focus on their IPs -- ranging through different levels of investment -- and distinct forms and abilities for their hardware, there are reasons they might not bring their games elsewhere or even that some games aren't terribly feasible for that.

And their overall strategy has helped avoid some of the pitfalls Microsoft and Sony have jumped into. At the very least, a journey to the same destination would be much less straightforward.

Even further, there's the overall IP strategy, with theme parks and movies and such, which opens other avenues for them to explore altogether.
 
A 4m dampening of expectations is something.

Its wild the PS5 has been around PS4 sales levels and was even outpacing it, but there is just less disposable income for entertainment floating around and now its slowed. Year 4.5 has usually been pretty good in recent history too.
Seems like Sony was lucky to have some games near completion during Covid and just baaaarely enough to get by since then (thanks Insomniac). (luckier still that Xbox has kind of been an even bigger nothing burger).

Looking back at the PS4 we got the reboot of GOW, new GoT, Spiderman, and Horizon, which all really took off. And we had a lot of cross gen for early PS5. I guess COVID caught up to the development pipeline afterall.

There just aren't enough games on the horizon or announced and now we know no major existing franchises are coming this year. (I hope Ghosts of Tsushima doesn't count as a major existing franchise, I'd like a new one.) There ARE probably some new IP coming which is very good (and needed), maybe this year. But Sony themselves doesn't seem to think this will be as big as old franchises. They are probably right, new IP has been a gamble with bigger budgets.

Big games just take SO long to make now. And the budgets are really high. Something will need to give, whether it be size/length/visuals/big actors/price. etc.

Some of Sony's bigger IPs have been MIA, where is Uncharted? There were rumors but nothing entuated.

I expect smaller games in the future ala Miles Morales. I guess Horizon Frozen shores should have been expanded slightly and been its own small title. DLC never sells like a "fullish" release, even a non-full priced one. A lot of there games drag on a bit too, and could use some small scope/size fat cutting.

I wonder what Sony has to gain by making more multi-plat? On PC there games have done "fine" but not incredibly. I can't imagine they would do better on Xbox's smaller market share. The Switch/2 getting some ports might do decently though with the big market. I wouldn't be surprised if the plan leaned more towards some of the GaaS or free to play games going multi-plat, I'm sure some were planned to do so, but maybe all/most of them will now.

The bigger issue I think is that 15-20m software sales isn't enough.
 
They probably have found that they would make more money with timed exclusives than with exclusive exclusives. Microsoft seems to have found the same thing. I think Nintendo will be a holdout for multiple reasons.
 
Supreme Overlord said:
It looks like it's the Year of Luigi all over again. The Luigi Death Glare strikes again.
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be like luigi and manage your budgets, release games other than AAA, dont fire your devs at the end of every project and quit chasing the highest fidelity possible and you too won't have to be on the same storefront as the hitler sex game or that alex jones metroidvania
 
Lugia667 said:



this is....a very worrying quote tbh
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I mean it could be but it is also a potentially just a political way of saying putting all their chips into live service, which was a massive money sink and a huge investment that has so far yielded nothing happened because they had no idea how to make this model sustainable and profitable without just burning a bunch of money hoping to get lucky and make the next fortnite

a potential solution to that or what he possibly could be suggesting is just to you know, go back to making traditional games where the sales of games can be better predicted so you can better budget for a higher margin on their investment into first party games and not gamble everything on a theoretical sky high ceiling.
 
So what are the odds that Sony will throw some of their older scrimblo bimblo shit on Nintendo hardware now? I'm thinking a Jak and Daxter collection, Ratchet, Sly etc. would do nicely
 
Soul Skater said:
I mean it could be but it is also a potentially just a political way of saying putting all their chips into live service, which was a massive money sink and a huge investment that has so far yielded nothing happened because they had no idea how to make this model sustainable and profitable without just burning a bunch of money hoping to get lucky and make the next fortnite

a potential solution to that or what he possibly could be suggesting is just to you know, go back to making traditional games where the sales of games can be better predicted so you can better budget for a higher margin on their investment into first party games and not gamble everything on a theoretical sky high ceiling.
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One of those GAAS projects, Helldivers 2, just released and has been doing quite well
 
palemire said:
So what are the odds that Sony will throw some of their older scrimblo bimblo shit on Nintendo hardware now? I'm thinking a Jak and Daxter collection, Ratchet, Sly etc. would do nicely
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Something. I think it depends on their desire to return to and monetize their back catalog.

I'm once again feeling annoyed by the state of controller button labeling. I think I wouldn't be so annoyed if Nintendo had labeled the NES controller buttons A B instead of B A and history had just followed from there. Confirm and Cancel would have been the same across all platforms and port PSX games would be emulation plus some button glyph swaps.
 
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robertman2 said:
One of those GAAS projects, Helldivers 2, just released and has been doing quite well
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Thats good; sure I guess I shouldn't say nothing but like I guess we'll see how long it is successful for and I think on Sony's end they likely expected more of them to hit than like 1. Factions got canceled because they couldn't figure it out and they acquired Bungie just for them to struggle and lay people off too. It's overall been a mess.

Not to say they shouldn't ever try to do a GAAS but they clearly went in too hard without enough of their studios having much of a solid plan on how to make it actually consistently work.
 
robertman2 said:
One of those GAAS projects, Helldivers 2, just released and has been doing quite well
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Right, but look at everything else they announced or acquired.

Putting all of their chips onto like seven different live service games and hitting at least short-term success with one is not a winning strategy.
 
robertman2 said:
One of those GAAS projects, Helldivers 2, just released and has been doing quite well
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That's better than it releasing and not doing well, but it's now another thing for it to maintain that. The whole point of GAAS is that it's supposed to have a longer lifespan than your average game.
 
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I'm actually loving my PS5 gaming.
The controller is incredible, loads of games can be played at 60fps and there's some really crackers in there.
Yep, the GaaS rubbish and demise of Sony Japan Studio has been quite a loss but during this generation I've loved
Ratchet and Clank
Horizon:FW
Like a Dragon:Ishin
Ghost of Tsushima
Final Fantasy 7 Remake:Intermission
Resident Evil Village
Kena: Bridge of Spirits
Demon's Souls
Elden Ring
The Last of Us Part 2
Yakuza : Like a Dragon

In my backlog I have
Alan Wake 2
The Quarry
RE4 Remake
A Plague Tale : Requiem

I'd like to buy FF XVI, will definitely get FF7 Rebirth, would like to try Returnal.

So, quite a few games are upgraded PS4 games but it doesn't matter, great games are great games and there's been some amazing gaming the last few years so I don't see this generation being as bad as some of you seem to.

I'm currently getting to the end of Greedfall which I'm really loving, things like that and a Plague Tale are exactly the type of AA games that are more sustainable and I'd like to see more of from now on, hopefully the current "crisis" will be a wake up call.
 
This will never happen, but instead of Sony letting their developers make games with these massive budgets that take forever to come out, I'd love to see Sony implement a policy of the best possible game you can make with a two year dev cycle without crunch. Scope things back and come up with new ways to make development efficient.

It's clear that Sonys solution since the PS3 era has been to make better looking, more expensive games, and as a result dev times go up. But these hardware manufacturers and publishers should seriously begin factoring time and efficiency over pure scope and beauty.
 
Scrawnton said:
This will never happen, but instead of Sony letting their developers make games with these massive budgets that take forever to come out, I'd love to see Sony implement a policy of the best possible game you can make with a two year dev cycle without crunch. Scope things back and come up with new ways to make development efficient.

It's clear that Sonys solution since the PS3 era has been to make better looking, more expensive games, and as a result dev times go up. But these hardware manufacturers and publishers should seriously begin factoring time and efficiency over pure scope and beauty.
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two years without crunch? you might be able to make some shovelware. maybe
 
Releasing their multiplayer games day and date on PC as well is definitely the way to go, as seen with Helldivers 2's success. 1st party single player games, though, nah. That's not to way to go when you're one of the leading console manufacturers, and releasing on PC later just gives the games a 2nd life/boost.
 
robertman2 said:
two years without crunch? you might be able to make some shovelware. maybe
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In the late 80s and very early 90s, games took like 4-6 months. Probably a bit more if you add small team concept work to the head of it. Once the game was done, then it was done, and they didn't touch it again. There were exceptions, but now it's 300 people over 6 years or whatever for big games.

There are still analogues to this. I feel that Nintendo could do another game worth of Super Mario Wonder levels in a year, but the way they'd do that now would be to release it as DLC instead.
 
robertman2 said:
two years without crunch? you might be able to make some shovelware. maybe
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That Celeste 64 thing was made in, per the development team, "a week-ish" and it was a surprisingly solid 1-2 hour experience; it's definitely not "retail ready" or anything as is, but I think over 2 years they could probably have fleshed that out into a decent full game if that's the direction they wanted to go in

If you're willing to compromise on scope and not push for the most expensive-looking photorealistic mo-capped graphics ever, a good dev team could definitely put together something fun and interesting and polished in 2-ish years. It just wouldn't feel "AAA" in the way people have come to expect from some of these big publishers, and selling that kind of thing to people who think all games should aspire to be The Last of Us or God of War or Spider-Man 2018 is the real challenge imo
 
I can't believe the Silent Hill: A Short Message and Foamstars erasure I'm seeing itt. Sony releases two AA top quality exclusives and people just act like there's no games 😔
 
Mekanos said:
I think diminishing returns on console sales are exactly why Nintendo is pivoting to IP-driven businesses like movies and theme parks. May not be for a couple of decades but eventually the console business might either die out or transform into something unrecognizable.
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I don't see games going away to turn into movies or theme parks. All three are very different things.

Is it dimishing returns in sales or is realism too expensive to chase and should more companies look into more stylised games to cut costs?

Nintendo has been very smart to not chase realism. And now they've got loads of talent that understands how far you can go with art styles.
 
Lucifer said:
I don't see games going away to turn into movies or theme parks. All three are very different things.

Is it dimishing returns in sales or is realism too expensive to chase and should more companies look into more stylised games to cut costs?

Nintendo has been very smart to not chase realism. And now they've got loads of talent that understands how far you can go with art styles.
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In 20-30 years the industry could look very different and Nintendo may want to pursue other options for their ecosystem. They’ll still make games but focusing on strengthening their IP in the longterm will make people invested in other forms of media in addition to the games. They very clearly want to be the Disney of gaming, in that regard.
 
Mekanos said:
In 20-30 years the industry could look very different and Nintendo may want to pursue other options for their ecosystem. They’ll still make games but focusing on strengthening their IP in the longterm will make people invested in other forms of media in addition to the games. They very clearly want to be the Disney of gaming, in that regard.
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Would be smart as long as they keep quality in mind. I'd argue they're already the Disney in gaming. Now they need to make sure that they don't fall like Disney.
 
Lucifer said:
Would be smart as long as they keep quality in mind. I'd argue they're already the Disney in gaming. Now they need to make sure that they don't fall like Disney.
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Disney is the biggest media company on the planet. I wouldn't say they've fallen.
 
Rooster said:
MS: hey we're gonna start putting CoD on your systems
Nintendo: cool
MS: actually we're gonna start putting a bunch of our games on your systems
Nintendo: cool
Sony: ...yeah us too
Nintendo: cool

"Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing" energy lol
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This reminds me of this really old GIF. I think this was even pre-Wii U! And it aged like fine wine.




Day 1 PS5 exclusives on PC is a big win for PC gamers!
 
AngryAlchemist said:
Actually, in terms of games this generation, I think we're finally getting to a good point? Tekken 8, Yakuza 8 and Persona 3 Reloaded is a pretty good lineup to start the year, then you had stuff like Armored Core VI, Baldur's Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Resident Evil 4 last year etc etc. Maybe a bit too remake heavy but still.

The problem is, I'm err ... playing all these on games on my PC and not on my PS5 ... lmao. I think the generation has gotten better, but consoles have just been getting worse.
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I'm not a PC gamer, meaning I "require" a PlayStation or Xbox for exclusives and multiplats alongside a Nintendo console, but the PS5 has just been extremely mid to me so far. It still feels like the generation hasn't properly begun, and the list of PS5 exclusives is downright sad.
Armoured_Bear said:
would like to try Returnal
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It's been my main game for the past couple weeks, and I think it's excellent. Exactly the sort of dark, lonely, cryptic, atmospheric, fast-paced, action packed game that's right up my alley. Makes me imagine how cool Housemarque's take on Metroid could potentially be, even if it'll obviously never manifest. I hope you enjoy it, once you get around to playing it!
AngryAlchemist said:
I can't believe the Silent Hill: A Short Message and Foamstars erasure I'm seeing itt. Sony releases two AA top quality exclusives and people just act like there's no games 😔
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I heard The Short Message was cheeks 😭 I think I might've already said this the other day, but between it and the Silent Hill 2 remake looking rough, the responsibility falls on NeoBards (famed developers of Resident Evil Resistance and Re:Verse) to give us a worthwhile modern Silent Hill experience 🙏
 
bmfrosty said:
Disney is the biggest media company on the planet. I wouldn't say they've fallen.
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I wouldn't say that they're doing great either. What I meant to say is that no company is immune in the end and I hope Nintendo remains a company that will keep making great games.
 
Mekanos said:
I think diminishing returns on console sales are exactly why Nintendo is pivoting to IP-driven businesses like movies and theme parks. May not be for a couple of decades but eventually the console business might either die out or transform into something unrecognizable.
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I can see that too. But I think Nintendo will not want to totally abandon a platform they have control over which, with them being a hardware (toys and peripherals) and software maker aligns with them.

At least not while they're on top.
 
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Lucifer said:
I wouldn't say that they're doing great either. What I meant to say is that no company is immune in the end and I hope Nintendo remains a company that will keep making great games.
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Ok. I won't quibble about the quality or lack thereof for Disney's products. Media taste is a matter of opinion. I will say they're mostly competent, but often lack daring.
 
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