It doesn’t seem like Sony has any plans of slowing down its recent string of acquisitions. In fact, during a recent conversation on the Official PlayStation Podcast, Jim Ryan, the president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said the company wants to buy even more developers.
“We’re in a really good place with PlayStation Studios and have been for the past few years. The critical success and the commercial success of the games that they’ve been making… that has given us permission to invest heavily in content creation,” Ryan said. “We’re growing our studios organically and we’re growing through acquisition. We acquired five studios during the course of 2021, we’re in discussions with Bungie and we have more planned. This is getting us into a virtuous cycle where success begets success.”
Ryan didn’t stop there, though. He also confirmed that Sony has no plans to include day-one releases with its new subscription service because that could potentially damage the quality of games.
“The games that we make are getting bigger; they’re getting better, they’re getting more beautiful, they’re getting richer, the narrative is getting stronger… this is really great and gamers tell us this is what they really want from PlayStation,” he explained. “Now, I have to say, putting these games into a subscription service immediately upon their release would break this virtuous circle, and we wouldn’t be able to invest in the way that we’re currently able to. So we’re not doing it. We’re going to stick to the approach that we have and has served us well under many years now.”
Sony has been making a ton of recent moves to maintain its pace with Microsoft in the console wars. Following the organization’s acquisition of Haven Studios, Sony now has an internal development team made up of 18 different studios.
The Profit‘s Take:
I’m glad that we have an actual statement from Sony with tangible information. We know Xbox and Microsoft have bought studios and committed to putting their games onto Game Pass on day one. PlayStation is saying they’re buying studios but definitely NOT putting their games on the subscription service on day one. So, there is a clear difference in strategy here. I can understand some of the logic from both sides. Sony probably thinks if they put games on subscription services, they will make less money. When you have less money, your budget to make products shrinks, creating a world of garbage games. Maybe they’re just more pessimistic about the potential for their subscription service. Microsoft’s view is the more games on the subscription service on day one, the more subscribers you get, so the pie gets bigger. However, that’s not necessarily the case today because there are still 15-20 million Game Pass subscribers worldwide. Still, it’s plausible that we could live in a world with 100+ million Game Pass subscribers. We are assuming more games will become exclusives as more studios get acquired. We are currently in a golden age where most games come out on both systems. But, both sides could go full nuclear and just make every game a console exclusive, leading us into a video game Cold War.
(All information was provided by Video Games Chronicle)
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