Sony’s strategy continues between openness towards new approaches and rigid conservatism regarding flagship games, in the belief of encouraging the sale of consoles, but does it really work?
Among the numbers and records reeled off by Sony in recent hours, especially with regards to the PlayStation area, there was also confirmation of the mixed strategy that had already been announced some time ago by the company, in fact reiterated letter by letter by Hermen Hulst: the Live service games will release on day one on PS5 than on PC, but the main single player games will arrive on PS5 first and only after a certain period of time also on PC. The idea continues Jim Ryan’s vision and shows that Sony, from this point of view, has a rather conservative approach, but the numbers so far have been on its side and a desire to preserve the realm of “high performance” consoles is very understandable.
However, it is not certain that the idea really works as it was exposed by the head of Sony Interactive Entertainment: “We have a two-pronged approach,” said Hulst, “For live service games, we publish them simultaneously (on PC and console). With our flagship titles, our single-player narrative titles, we take a more strategic approach and introduce our franchises to new audiences.” This would be the main element of the strategy: “We are finding a new audience interested in playing sequels on PlayStation. We hope to be able to bring new players to PlayStation in general, but specifically to consoles.” So the idea that can be read between the lines is to postpone the launch of games on PC for push new users to buy PS5 or PlayStation consoles in general.
Between openness and conservatism
The sale of console hardware remains a pillar of Sony’s entire economy, which now has PlayStation as its cornerstone, and despite recent openings it remains structured according to the principles of the 80s and 90s, that is, placing as many platforms as possible, using the exclusives as a fundamental “weapon” for promotion and marketing.
The opening to multiplatform is seen more as a collateral element to the push towards live service games: the latter are now products on which it is essential to focus to guarantee a certain constant revenue, but they need large and varied communities, therefore the public PC becomes a key element to achieve success, but it almost seems like a sort of “necessary evil” in the classic strategy that seems to emerge from Hulst’s words.
As for the most characteristic single player games, their home is still mainly the PlayStation console and the more or less late ports have the double objective of increasing revenue but also (and perhaps above all) bringing a new audience closer to the PS5. AND a strategy which, however, also has dubious elements: the delayed release tends to dilute the interest in some games a bit and the fact of essentially having to set up two promotional campaigns, separated by a few months, for the launch of a single game, does not seem very convenient from the point of view of economic view. The fact that this could serve to push users to go to the other side of the fence is also questionable, because it is difficult to think that people who are used to playing on PC, who do not already have a PlayStation, would decide to buy the latter just to not wait a few months, especially if prices remain relatively high.
A generally crystallized market
In fact, the audience trend seems to have become somewhat crystallized: despite some possible increase recorded by Sony, which could also derive from the contraction of the Xbox audience, the pool of console users overall has not changed much, and it is precisely this chronic lack of growth which is among the causes of the current crisis situation in the overall videogame industry. The maintenance of temporal exclusivity on single player games thus appears as a sort of marketing bulwark to maintain a specific identity, and it is a perfectly understandable solution for a company that still focuses on the sale of hardware, where part of the competition is moving more towards services and software. It remains to be seen how long the gaming market will continue in its current configuration before transforming into something different and less tied to hardware, but for the moment the numbers certainly prove Hulst’s strategy right.
Then there is another aspect to consider: the desire to expand the ecosystem at the intersection between PC and PlayStation through the PSN account and the overlay, which emerged clearly with the recent affair on the need for the PSN account for Helldivers 2. It is reasonable to think that this request will be progressively extended and become an increasingly important element for Sony, which in this way could significantly increase the indices relating to active users, even without necessarily going through the purchase of consoles.
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial team and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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