Sony to Invest More in Live Service Games Than Traditional Games Starting This Fiscal Year - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 June 2023 / 3,982 Views
Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan in a presentation during Sony's Business Segment Meetings revealed PlayStation will be investing more in live service games than traditional games starting with the current fiscal year.
Just 12 percent of the game investment into the PS5 was for live service games, while the remaining 88 percent were for traditional games. For the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2024, the percent of the total investment into live service games will be 55 percent, compared to 45 percent for traditional games. Live service investment will grow to an expected 60 percent in the 2025 fiscal year, while percent spent on traditional games will shrink to 40 percent.
The overall amount of money invested into the PS5 business model will increase over the coming years. The total amount spent on traditional games in the 2023 fiscal year will be lower than in the 2019 fiscal year. However, it will increase in the 2025 fiscal year to be a bit higher than it was in the 2019 fiscal year. This is according to Sony's internal projections.
The amount of money in the gaming industry projected to be spent on the full digital games is expected to decrease over the coming years from $8.6 billion in 2022 to $7.4 billion in 2026. While the amount spent on add-on content is expected to grow from $11.8 billion in 2022 to $19.2 billion. Subscriptions are also expected to see growth from $8.2 billion in 2022 to $12.0 billion in 2026.
Sony is planning to have12 live service games available on the market by the fiscal year ending March 2026, which is up from three during the previous fiscal year.
"We have been working with Bungie for almost a year, and the learnings in both directions have been very significant," said Ryan during the webcast (transcribed by VideoGamesChronicle). "They surpassed my expectations and equally, I think Bungie is extremely excited by what they can take from SIE in terms of market reach, marketing, collaboration and the ability to amplify their IP."
He added, "We’ve brought quite a lot to Bungie, just as they’ve certainly brought quite a lot to us. They historically have been a heavily US-focused publisher [with] their IP underexploited in key markets of Europe and Asia.
"[Sony Interactive Entertainment] is extremely strong and extremely experienced in Europe and Asia, and we are just starting the process of reigniting Bungie’s presence and game-awareness in those regions. I’d also say… we have a marketing machine that, in my view, is world class and setting them to work on activating Bungie’s games, IP and brand I think is going to take their awareness and size of their business to a size that they’ve never seen before."
PlayStation Studios boss Hermen Hulst revealed that Bungie is now involved with the development of all of its live service games.
"The learnings from Bungie have been very substantial in many areas," Hulst said. "Of course, when you’re developing live service titles, you [require] capabilities that you don’t have when you’re working on single-player, narrative-driven games.
"And these capabilities that we’ve set up inside PlayStation Studios have been helped and guided by Bungie. We also more deeply understand what success means in live services. Historically, our games always worked towards an end, and this is a large cultural shift… the launch of a game is just the beginning, and it comes with a whole set of different [key performance indicators].
"We also work with Bungie on a pretty rigorous portfolio review process that we apply to all 12 live service titles that we have in production, and these are just brief examples of some of the learnings that we have gained from working with Bungie."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Gross
Percentage isn't as important as amount. If investment goes from 85% to 40% but overall investment increased by 150%, your traditional investment actually increases. The real takeaway here is that much more is being allocated to first party development. This is good because it means we aren't losing traditional investment. This is something to celebrate.
You will get downvoted until no one xan see your comment dude, not even worth it in this forum
I'll do my part to upvote! This forum really needs more intelligent comments like this one.
This mentality that there is this great bias against Sony is wild. Its more than fair for some to be a bit concerned about a bigger focus on live service than traditional games. It's also important to know what that traditional game budget is now and what it will be going forward. It could increase or decrease.
FYI people usually get downvoted due to their personality, not their platform alignment.
Irony as EA, after Fallen Order's success, went the other way.
According to stats, 100% of companies which said that regretted it
This will be a double-edged sword. Destiny has always been divisive since its inception, and even now, Bungie is still messing everything up. Destiny 2 right now is in its worst state it's been in since the Curse of Osiris DLC at the end of 2017, and Bungie had to have layoffs because of it.
So while its great that Sony will at least have a leg up on knowing how to make a live service, consistency and quality, I hope they don't take too many beats from Bungie on that front lol. Not to mention the INSANE monetization!
It'll be interesting to see what kind of affect this could have on their single-player games with their live-service ambitions. Even if a handful of these live-service games do become hits, the investment to keep them successful will only grow. Curious what the plans are for mobile as well.
concern
1) Not a fan of live service games at all and couldn't care less, but maybe Sony already has a plan laid out for their traditional games. As long as Sony still delivers quality traditional games on a regular basis as they've been doing then go for it. I'm sure if Sony sees the live services aren't meeting their expectations they'll likely slow down and revert back.
2) Sony did buy Bungie so they obviously want to use them as much and as best as possible. I mean that would be very stupid of a company to buy developers and not utilize them. Worst case is if Bungie cant create a successful live service game then I'm sure Sony will have them create a more traditional game later on.
While I loathe live service as a concept, I can understand why they are doing this. If successful, it will print insane amounts of money, so they have to at least try to keep up with others on that front. I want them to thrive. If I'm reading this correctly, I will still be getting the single player experiences I'm expecting, so let's go for it.
From the looks of it, yes. Looking at the Sony games thing yesterday, they announced 3 PvP games from (now) Sony owned studios, all have PC releases (one has Xbox) but they are all new or recently purchased studios. The more traditional older studios didn't announce anything and those are the ones who have more traditionally made single player experiences.
A few of their studio recently released games (as in the last year or so) but other haven't offered anything in a few years. Sucker Punch, Media Molecule, Asobi and others, and this is outside of their XDev stuff.
This how you lose a customer Sony
I mean they're also spending more on single player games than ever before.
Where did you get that from? The amount spent in 2023 is lower than 2019 on traditional games.
Sorry I wasn't particularly talking about this year.
I mean in general, SIE is spending more than they ever did during the PS1/PS2/PS3/PS4 eras on single player games.
There was a downtick in the past few years, but their investment in 2025 is higher than now or 2019.
They're not getting rid of single player games.
Just add this to the list of things Sony warriors for years swore Sony would never do.
GaaS isn’t actually a problem, so long as they are good. But none of the ones they showed yesterday looked any good.
RIP Sony game quality.
Their customer base is on single player games. They might attract new customers through this live sevice stuff. But that is a gamble. And I know I am not one bit excited about any of their new shooter games. Haven looks forgettable. Monetization can be a huge can of worms. They alienate their fanbase. Their mantra seems to be that single player games will stay and additionally, we will see gaas. But they have to proof that first. Where are the single player games? They had a showcase last night and apart from spider man nothing there but live service games from their first party. That is just not what the majority of their current fanbase wants to see. I hope they find success with this. Otherwise their single player offering might suffer even more.
When you look the graph and the investment for traditional games is basically the same as before they are giving you proof that the GAAS is an additional investment instead of reducing traditional to put GAAS (but of course I would prefer all this new investment to go to traditional SP games).
I get the graph, but the proof has to be in the pudding, not the chart. Also: their single player investment stays the same. With this inflation, that is more like a reduction. And this huge "new" pile of money going to gaas - I feel like you do - best would be all of it going to single player games. But they earned that money through single player games. Would seem more right to me that with such an astronomical increase in gaas investment we would at least see some sort of increase in single player investment.
Let's hope this is premature and before Spider Man 2 releases we will know at least one other first party single player game coming, other than Wolverine and MLB.
I swear I'll never touch any live service games. I don't want they to dictating how and when I play my own game.
That is certainly sad for me although comprehensible.
They want to experience getting burned,
They will learn their lessons soon enuf.
No thanks, guess I'll skip PS5. May wait till Meteor Lake for another rig.
whats next will the block chain
I feel like sony are testing the waters to see what they can get away with, they've already got away with leading the charge on $70 games, increasing the price of the ps5 after launch, poor subscription service, not releasing anything on ps5 since GoW ragnarok. Gaming needs competition otherwise I fear the future is bleak.
I've enjoyed those sorts of games before but sounds like not many here are enthusiastic about this...
Boo. -_-
Do these companies really not look at forums online and see what gamers want? They have to do the market research, to see this is not the direction gamers want them to take. Same thing with Square Enix on the nft crap.
They do, they also see $$$ thrown in their face by things like Fortnite or mobile games (see Diablo Immortal) and think "Where's my cut?"
That's partly the issue. As with most business-minded people, they (businessmen) are very short-sided. They do not think about long-term anything. Well, some do. But most don't. Most (and I'm not saying that is the case here with Sony at all) would seriously rather go all-in, make a fortune, and then exit as soon as their decisions destroy the industry. It's happened quite a lot, almost as if they think they're playing the stock market, or something.
As usual, when these things happen, the fans of said industries end up the victims.
Rinse and repeat.
Live service is unpopular with a lot of people. Except the market says otherwise. Sony literally showed the data that said that people were spending less on buying games, but still spending more on content.
Call of Duty, Fortnite, Destiny, League of Legends, Final Fantasy XIV, Overwatch, Grand Theft Auto V's online mode, Genshin Impact, etc. There's tons of money in live service games.
Mobile market alone is proof of this, it apparently makes more than all of the console and PC gaming markets combined, majority of that market is F2P service games.
I'm so glad MS is not taking this approach.
And they are looking to buy Activision Blizzard who are all but only service games now (with some of the worst monetisation). Sony current service game output on PS5 is Destruction Allstars, which wasn't the best, MLB the show, but that's a yearly entry game and GT7, 3 out of 10 or so new, 13-14 with remasters. So increasing their output as a business thing makes sense if they can get them to work to compete with things like Apex, CoD, Fortnite etc.
Which is stupid, play to your strengths.
EDIT: Realised, most of this whole thing could be mobile game stuff which might not affect many of us.
Just because they have already done it long ago =p
Laying down the foundation for NFTs.
