Bleak future with almost record breaking profits every quarter. Until a lot of consumers learn to stop tolerating thigns they'll never face a bleak future. Especially with Xbox dicking around even worse
I dont think you've been paying attention if you think its one mediocre game. If wolverine does poorly, that's 4 games in a row that have sold badly. Concord, marathon, Saros, and now Wolverine looks shaky. Add in the fact that they've cancelled even more games in the background. The last hit of Sony was Astrobot as far as I can remember 2 years ago
Its future is bleak, because they’ve made numerous brain dead decisions that will hurt them over time. Alienating playerbases, taking their reputation for the best single player experiences and turning 180 degrees to focus on multiplayer, which is CLEARLY a failure… they now are what, a console? They’re not elite. They’re also-ran. They’re coasting on a name and unless they change their leadership, it’ll eventually catch up to the metrics. There is always a story associated with the data, and there are always business people looking to just focus on numbers instead. Think about it. If your golden goose is drawing for you in big numbers, why would you suddenly start beating it and starving it, and trying to get people to show up for a regular pig instead? Eventually people will see how you handle the things that bring you your success, and stop trusting you.
Sony's stock is flat over the last 5 years and down 20% from its high. Gross profit is 19% in the last 4 years, but between the yen falling 13% in the time period against the USD and high inflation, adjusted for that gross profits are down from 4 years ago.
If you JUST look at last quarter earnings... it looks like Playstation performed well from the headline number, but that's almost exclusively from tariff refunds, and revenue sales actually decreased in the quarter.
I dont really get the staning for a big company. I dont think Sony is dead, but even they will be internally agreeing that they are currently performing very poorly and needing to do major course correction. If Xbox wasn't also underperformed, they might be in trouble
They have lost an obscene amount of money and more importantly development resources on their massive, failed live service initiative. They have problems that run far deeper than one game
You underestimate how valuable PR is and the long term impact it has on profitability. This year was always going to go well sales wise bec GTA 6 is coming out. The amount of ppl that in the long run will switch off Sony has massively increased after the whole disc thing and all the awful decisions since. Especially with your average joe getting more interested in PCs
The discs thing isn’t a thing. The next gen of consoles was always going to be digital. They’re not losing any significant number of customers over it.
As for the awful decisions since the ‘disc thing’. They haven’t made any awful decisions. The Kojima decision was smart, not awful.
numbers don't lie, except this (along with the other 50 things they have going on) is fucking AWFUL for them and they're not going to take this well internally
you guys forget that profitability for corporations is secondary to seeming successful to attract more future money, and Sony has been in the dumps lately which will affect them in the short term (which is what they care about)
Not gonna lie, I had high hopes for Wolverine but it’s only because everything else they produce is top tier record breaking. Spiderman, Last of Us, Uncharted, etc. Can’t fault them for a single average game when they’ve been hitting 10s forever. They’ve earned a pass or two.
Marathon is a pretty good game that sold like shit cause it's an extraction shooter from a dev team that was under fire for years, and Concord is a genuine anomaly event that can't be placed on the same level as anything else
One? And the rest. PS5 has been mid on top of mid on top of flop for Sony. Half their games have been cancelled this generation after wasting years chasing Live Service, then half of those released have been below PS4 quality for writing and game play.
But it was written by, "Matt Purslow, who has been there from day one for every PlayStation generation since the PS2." So he has not been there since day one?
Nah you’re right. Time and again we’ve seen an unpopular move get a huge backlash initially, then become the norm. No one will care about this in 2 years, it’ll be standard.
GTA VI is going to break every record for media and vast, vast majority will be playing on PS5.
This is all a reaction to physical discs and unless there’s some statistical anomalies going on, the numbers suggest there’s a huge amount of hypocrisy going on.
The thing about record profits every quarter is that sooner or later they end as the market stops growing, and Sony is doing a lot of things to shrink their market. So I do think things are going to be bleak, maybe not immediately but it is a foregone conclusion.
This is an article about creative stagnation. I guess it should be “The future has never been bleaker for people who want PlayStation to make good games”
If that’s what you see then you’re just as naive as the execs running Sony. All they see is numbers go up, must be good. They’re not looking at the future, they’re strictly focused on the numbers now. They’re doing irreversible damage to their brand.
I agree that shortism is the route of most problems for companies like Sony, especially publicly traded ones but there’s naivety on the other end as well.
Sony have only ever cared about profit. It just so happened their strategy aligned with our interests.
If Sony knew what the likes of Fortnite and Overwatch did in advance, they absolutely would have made those games instead of Bloodborne, GOW, TLOU etc.
There’s also the fact that this is article is a month or so out from GTA VI, which is likely going to be the biggest media launch in history.
Yup. Burning hot for max profit, but burning that hot is also slowly turning everything to ash. Thats an example but people here don't understand business, weird to see Sony making such stupid decisions.
Lol what damage, yall really need to leave your echochambers and even this ign clown is wrong.
It's 1 mid single player game in a sea of nearly 9-10/10s. There's only the perception of irreversible damage. Far fewer people give a ahit about physical. They are about to pass 100 million console sold for the 4th time.
everything people say does not equate to reality. Love service was thr main bad choice but they canned majority of those games years ago
The sequels are great, but there just like the games they followed.... right, like modern Mario games, modern Zelda games, modern CoD games, modern anything with sequels.
How is "games in a franchise are alike" a criticism. This entire article is bait.
Things are bleak for Sony. You expect revenues to dry up overnight? No, it’ll take some time but they’re on a downward trajectory. Pay attention over the next 6-12 months. When you take out gta results are going to be bad.
You’re exactly right and that’s why you can look at it without gta. It’s a once in a lifetime thing. So take that out to normalize things. Then you see the results of Sony not doing so hot
Lmao you dont know wtf your talking about, they are about to pass 100 million console sold for the 4th time, almost ALL of their mainline sequels have sold over 10 mil copies. Saros was a lower budget game like retunal and did find success.
They've missed with 1 major failure with concord and helldivers was a sucess. Marathon is in-between that. Nobody cares as much about physical as reddit seems to think either.
It sucks wolverine was mid but that's fine since im sure they will learn for next time
They did okay this gen up until recently. You will start to see that momentum shift. The bad press is definitely affecting the console. And it will likely carry into next gen as well.
Saros lost money. Did worse than returnal with about double the budget. A terrible result.
Marathon is dead. Not sure how to see that any other way…
How is a game with active players dead? It probably has alot more players on console to. I admit its not that great of a game but its not a disaster like cocord was
It’s not as simple as that. The 100 people are spending on GTA might have been spent elsewhere. Games have changed their release times to work around GTA.
You can’t separate the two. If you said to me ‘look how they doing in a years time’ fine, that’s reasonable but you can’t just put GTA to one side
I understand the results count. No one is saying they don’t. But you may see increased console sales but it’s ONLY due to gta. It’s called an outlier. You take that out and the picture will look very different.
This. Unfortunately with the fact that PS5 Pros are out of stock at retailers across the globe tells the executives that they can get away with taking away physical media and revoking access at any time especially if your account is inactive.
People forget that not everyone is chronically online and most Joe shmoes dgaf. The only solution is to boycott any and all products of their interactive entertainment division.
Xbox is no better and honestly I think Kojima was short sighted signing on with them. He traded one devil for another.
People want to play those games with their friends. Odds are their friends have a PlayStation going off of known sales numbers alone. People will buy the same console as their friends. It's been this way since PS2 and Xbox.
Notice how there are plenty of Xboxes available to purchase right now? A lot of people waited for a good reason to buy a console this gen. GTA is that reason for a lot of people and they aren't buying Xboxes.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. PS5 Pros are sold out everywhere. If I were buying a console now it would definitely be a Pro for no other reason than having a little more power and being able to take it farther into the next gen.
Got it. But you also have to take into account that Sony manufactures very few pro consoles. I don’t think we get the split in the us but look at Japan sales. The pro console sold 7% of all ps5 sales. That is probably very similar worldwide. It’s a niche product
Yeah it’s pretty obvious the title is meant as “the future is bleak for ps5 players who bought in for the single-player focused exclusives”. Like obviously if you got a ps5 just to play multi-plats without having to deal w/ building/maintaining a PC you’ll be fine, that’s not what it’s about
Heavily propped up by Demon’s souls remake, Astro bot, and saros, so 3 games… and one is a remake. One could argue the only real killer app exclusive is Saros.
I would not say record breaking when compared to active users vs past gens. Before the GTA 6 gameplay reveal, they had not sold as few consoles since the last few months of the PS1 era. And their other projects have not exactly made a huge return this gen. Nor does it seem even wolverine will
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u/ZxynesZxero 15h ago
Bleak future with almost record breaking profits every quarter. Until a lot of consumers learn to stop tolerating thigns they'll never face a bleak future. Especially with Xbox dicking around even worse