The only winner of their PC initiative (started in 2019) is now Steam.
This is bullshit, they just made $500-600M out of this almost $700M "other software" revenue with an insane CAGR yearly growth and huge ROI for the old PC ports.
That yearly PC revenue will continue growing, this year they'll have HD2 tail + The Final Shape + Concord + Until Dawn remake. And maybe also GoWR and TLOU2.
Even the worst selling one, Sackboy, got profitable. GoTDC got profitable in under two hours after release. Remember that their ports only cost around $2M to be made.
And starting 2023 they are doing less money overall on their first party games than before Jimbo strategy,
No. In 2023 they made a bit less money on first party (counting only PS) because this FY23 they didn't have a Destiny 2 release and their only other big AAA was Spider-Man 2 (plus got lucky with Helldivers), when in FY22 they had Destiny 2 Lightfall, GT7, HFW and GoWR.
But well, both Spider-Man and Helldivers 2 broke sales records for any PS console exclusive game in history. So they made less money because released less big games, but the ones they released have been record hits, so everything is fine.
- First they are getting less money from those PC sales because of lower price on PC (due to more competition on Steam) and the 30% tax.
This is not true, we saw the average revenue per copy sold that a Sony team gets from PS games on the Insomniac leaks and it's basically the same we saw they get from PC in the Sony "Business Segments" yearly reports.
First, the Steam tax is only for the portion the game generated under $10M. Then for the portion when generated between $10 and $50M it's 25%. And for the portion after having generated $50M it's 20%.
Second, their PC releases are digital only, where in console they have costs from the physical versions. So at the end they end getting a similar revenue per copy on Steam and PS, even if releasing in PC with a somewhat reduced price in case of old ports.
As I remember the average revenue per copy that the teams got varied between $24 and $37 depending if it was a recent release still not discounted or if it was a lower priced or highly discounted/price dropped title.
Microsoft has a nice cross benefit with their other products so it's hard to compare it to sony. Sony obviously get loads of short-term benefits but we need to see if its not interfering with their main business longterm. But yes rn it's obviously working.
The effect of their PC strategy started in 2019 (even if Sony has been publishing games on computers since the '80s) is that their console kept growing achieving all time active userbase records for any console brand and that their first party games on console had almost every year a title that broke all time record sales for any PS console exclusive ever.
And despite consoles shortages, a price increase (instead of price drop PS4 already had at this point), PS4 still having a record active userbase that still didn't migrate to next gen,. a global epidemic and a globla financial crysis, PS5 units sold is almost is at PS4 levels (just 800K behind).
We also saw in the leaked documents that early last year half of people who purchased a PS5 never had a PS before.
TLDR: If their PC strategy is having any effect on their console business it's positive, they continue breaking records there in basically all KPIs and segments.
