Zenimax helps MS gain most of rpg fans. That will inflict huge blow to Sony.
lets put it this way. Xbox owns obsidian and bethesda. Both are rpg studios. Rpg fans will go to xbox to play those rpg games. Rpgs studios will prefer xbox console, because it has more rpg users.
The same thing is happening to Sony. MS had japanese support during x360. now most of them are on PlayStation console. And those japanese studios are going to Switch now.
No, doesn't affect Sony beause as I said Bethesda games weren't even a 3% of the games sold on PS4.
And Sony has a tons of RPG like the ones from Square Enix (FF, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, Forspoken, Mana, Star Ocean..), Bandai Namco (Tales, Ni no Kuni, Soulsbornes), Sega (Yakuza, Persona..), CD Project, Ubisoft, Vanillaware, Kadokawa and many other relatively small Japanese ones. Many of them not available on Xbox at least temporally and with the multi ones selling more on PS.
MS did buy Zenimax because Sony had a big lead regarding amount of exclusives. And still will be the case, but now with less distance. I mean not only in RPGs, in general.
But we have to wait and see if it's the case, because Sony is growing their existing studios, acquiring new ones (plus have a remaining acquisitions budget of as I remember $14B for the next few years), last year spend a record amount of money on signing 2nd party games for the next 7 years and Jimbo said they also planned to increase their amount of 3rd party exclusives, and that PS5 will have more exclusives than the previous consoles.
that strategy is worthless at this time.
Sony's current strategy is the most successful one any console platformer had in gaming history.
Business world evolves every time. We get new stuff. if a company cant compete with these new ideas, they will be left behind. Sears is clear example of that. They couldn't compete with E-commence businesses.
This is why Sony was the first console platform holders on investing hard on things like game streaming or VR. And why they release new generations of their devices and services and keep tweaking them. And why they have been (and will continue) increasing their investment in additional areas like streaming, PC or mobile, to reach new audiences and countries where traditional console market can't reach. And why they are working to increase their efforts on MP or GaaS (and I assume they'll start testing F2P).
But as now they not only compete, they dominate sales of consoles, games for console, game subscriptions or console VR and revenue generated by their gaming division (vs the other platform holders). Plus the sales of their top 1st/2nd party games keep growing.
To consumers eyes, that is a great value for them. We are still in the start of the 2nd year. Imagine, what gamepass will get in 3 years. How will sony compete with a service like that?
Sony has their own game subscriptions, that are a way better business than the MS ones because they have a way bigger amount of subscribers and cheaper cost because of not puttting the day one games there, but instead selling them and getting more money from them.
The Gamepass amoung of subscribers in July 2021 was basically the same they had in January 2021 (~18M), and in September 2021 they stopped sharing these numbers. So doesn't sound as a big danger for Sony, who seems to be merging their game subs services on a 50M subs service if the rumor is true, which also mentions what seems to be an extra tier PS Now tier without cloud gaming (similar to base GamePass but without day one games) and that they will increase its catalog with games from all their generations.
This will help them grow the service, and a bit more the other plans they have for it -not to compete with GP, they were already mentioned back in 2014 when they announced it-: to release it on smartphones, tablets and smart tvs.
But I think these game subs improvements are something secondary for their game subscription success: the main reason for successs I think it's the huge PS userbase and its huge and very diversified catalog.
The one that sells your console, is your software product, and what you offer consumers. So far, xbox is ahead of that. Gamepass+xcloud is huge software for consumers.
No, even if you personally may like more the MS offering, Sony is more successful on both hardware, games and services. Sony game subscriptions have more subs and Sony 1st/2nd/3rd party exclusives sell more than the MS ones.
You basically have a subscription model, that lets you play tons of game from your console, pc, phone, browser, and tv. All of that for 15$. You basically dont need to own xbox device at all for that.
I know, Sony announced this back in 2014 when they announced PS Now and their long term plans for it.
We are going in to uncharted territory. We have VR devices now. We have cloud gaming devices. These are tiny things that can change the way we view gaming as a whole. if you told me 15 years ago, that I can play console games on phone, I would have laughed at you. but here we are. Any momentum you had, is being destroyed by these anomalies.
Things change but 'slowly'. Streaming didn't evolve faster because of tech limits of internet connection quality, data caps, wifi and 4G technology, streaming technology, etc. Now we have better tech but things like wifi 6 routers, phones or 5G will need many years to be standard in most countries.
I assume PSVR2 will solve or at least improve many issues PSVR1 had but I think will continue being too expensive and will have other issues preventing it to go mainstream, but will continue helping them to increase and improve the VR market.
I think game subscriptions, cloud gaming and VR will grow during this generation, but won't be mainstream until at least the next one. And I bet Sony will dominate all 3 markets.
I think the big disruptors of this generation will be PC handhelds like Steamdeck and play-to-earn via NFT games (as the previous one was GaaS and specially F2P, which now have more players and generate more revenue than paid games). F2P become very popular because many people who couldn't afford paid games saw them more appealing, and they prefer to play spending $0. There's already people in emerging markets earning more money selling the in-game items they don't want anymore in Play-to-earn games than in a normal job, so I see a lot of potential there to grow. If people prefers to play for free than to play paying, they will also prefer to earn money for playing than to pay or to don't spend/earn.
PC (hybrid) handhelds will have more or less the same performance than a console or the average PC people use to play (which btw aren't new $2000 PCs), will be hybrid and will have an insane catalog thanks to PC library (now with Sony and MS games) plus emulators of tons of things including Switch running at a better performance than the original console plus all streaming services plus mobile games (Google is integrating Google Play on Windows, fan made emulators won't be needed). During many years the hardware of consoles, handhelds, smartphones, tablets and computers have been merging more and more becoming more and more similar, and I think these handhelds will complete that.
I think the Xbox successor (if it exists) will be a PC hybrid handheld, and even if the Switch successor will continue having a Nintendo OS only in terms of hardware will essentially be the same, and will be their last one. I also think Sony will release a traditional PS6 console but will also increase their focus on streaming, PC and will open their own PC store/client. And will be also their last console unless it's a hybrid PC handeld. At that point their revenue will come more from subscriptions and games (playable everywhere via streaming) than from hardware, so they won't care about having their own gaming hardware.
At this point, MS could buy any big publisher.
Yes, and Sony too, but they don't need to do it.
And well this publisher also has to want -or need to sell-, and doesn't seem the case of Activision, EA, Take 2, Ubisoft, Konami, Square, Bandai Namco or Capcom. They are in great financial shape. And not only MS and Sony are buying, there's also people like Tencent, Embracer, EA or Take 2 making bold acquisitions, which leads to overpricing the studios.
I think we'll see some acquiitions more in both MS and Sony side, but will be on a smaller scale. Individual studios instead of big publishers.
They gained 8 studios, and multiple IPs from bethesda alone. imagine what would they gain, from other publishers. Embracer has 86 studios, and 250 franchises. Their worth is $10.75b. What do you think will happen, If ms bought them?
I would say MS and Sony have no reason to be interested on Embracer.
current catalog. Their past catalog is great. No one will deny that. But they havent done those serious during ps4. We didnt even see Socum serious on ps4. Genre, not weird games. From shooter, mmorpg, racing, rpgs, fighting, etc.
Their current catalog includes many goty winners in the last decade, plus many GOTY candidates including the most awarded game ever and like half a dozen games that achieved or pretty likely will achieve 20M units sales.
Socom was a series with mediocre sales that nobody outside USA cared about it.
And yes, their current catalog (if we understand for this the games let's say they released for PS4) is more diverse than any other publisher, maybe only rivaled by Ubisoft. You can check out the games and genres they
published here (remember, they also published VR and PlayLink games), which doesn't include 3rd party exclusives (which every generation have been way more than their 1st+2nd party games) or multi games. They have many games that are so unique that can't be included on a common, standard, popular genre.
That could be bought by other publishers. MS bought skyrim. biggest rpg game. They could buy other rpg games.
You need in-house studios, to not lose those Ips. They could do bloodborne type business. Hire 3rd party studios to make the game for them, and Sony will own that IPs.
As I mentioned most best selling and best rated RPGs already are PS exclusives or are multi with PS as their best selling platform. This is why MS had to buy Skyrim and Fallout (still on PS like ESO and Fallout 76 btw) and not Sony.
Sony already has a shit ton of successful IPs and periodically release new very successful ones, they don't need to buy them outside. And specially in genres like RPG where their platform is the leading one.
And well, RPG is only a genre. There's a ton more. Most of them dominated by Sony. If you want to highlight one that will dominate MS instead of Sony you should look at strategy, not RPG. A genre were Sony won't be interested to compete because it's very small in consoles because it's mostly a PC genre.
Hiring 3rd party studios to make 1st party game published by Sony -who owns the IPs- are called 2nd party games. Like Bloodborne, Demon's Souls or Death Stranding or the Quantic Dreams ones, or the ones that the creators of Destiny, CoD BO and Assassin's Creed are doing for them.
Same as Rpgs. You need your own series. They have Socum. But they arent touching it for some reason.
They aren't touching Socom because they had other IPs with better way better sales. They are interested on games with a global appeal, not in games that only appeal a single country.
To put it in simple way, Think the market like Stock market. It can change to positive or negative. If you dont have any back up plan, you might lose everything.
Sony isn't betting everything on a single card, they have many fronts and they are the top dog in most of them:
- 3rd party sales on PS (gaming history records for any console platform holder)
- Console 1st+2nd party sales and awards during the last generation/decade (selling better than they ever did, winning more awards than any console platform holder ever did)
- PC ports (selling great even if are several years old games, seems GoW will outsell many big hitters)
- Their platform is the most popular one for the top multiplayer games and for most genres
- Hardware sales (PS4 and PS5 achieved many gaming history records for any console platform holder)
- Game subscriptions (gaming history records for any console platform holder)
- Cloud gaming (no other cloud gaming service posted a bigger subs number than them and they have the biggest catalog)
- VR (only console platform holder betting hard on it)
- Mobile games (even if they did mobile games since way over a decade ago, they will start betting on them harder soon, they already have a big performing game)
- Movies and TV shows made by them using their gaming IPs (Sony is a major in these other areas, so they will perform well)
- Gaming division revenue (gaming history records for any console platform holder, have money to continue growing their studios and do the acquisitions they may consider or are available)
They are doing a great job in most areas and are growing basically in most of them, so what common sense say is that they will continue being successful. Their performance may decrease in a few of them or temporally not being the top dog in a specific area, but that's all. They won't magically fail in most of their fronts.