Is Sony, in terms of PlayStation, going downhill?

They've lost all magic they once had, up to early last gen. PS5 isn't a bad console, and they still put out the occasional good game like Ghost of Tsushima, but PlayStation as a whole is just a shell of their former selves these days. PS5 is easily my least played console, and I've had PS + Premium all year. Got it dirt cheap last BF and it still hasn't been worth what I paid.

As a Playstation fan yes they are.

Whoring your exclusives to PC devalues your brand and I can say In all honesty after Spider-Man 2 there is only one exclusive officially announced that im excited about. They have gone nearly two years and have announced nothing.

Jim Ryan and their pivot to live service got them here. Now that he's gone hopefully they will move in the right direction.

An interesting reflection to consider. Let's go back to the days of the PS3 era. I remember for at least 2 years Sony posted record profits that were only achieved because they were selling off larger chunks of assets to make up for what would have kept them in the red. All while selling a PS3 console $600 that was losing around another $350 per unit sold due to its $950 per unit production cost. So, once they stopped hiding their losses as profits by selling billions of dollars in property, they were losing multiple billions each year, for several years straight. It got so bad there was an unnerving recognition Sony could go bankrupt. They were unable to secure financing due to risk of defaulting and had to resort (I forget how) to some unusual method to gain investment capital. They stopped the bleeding with only $20 billion inequity left to their name. Today, it's about $86B of equity which is quite the turn around.

It was during times of these staggering losses we saw Sony suffer huge losses in their HDTV division, their VAIO computers now gone. You can Google a good read called "The Ghost Of Sony" which talks about the CEO who set them on this awful course. He started in the ground level, worked himself up the corporate chain. Someone must have though he could provide unique leadership prospective but he seemed to enjoy too much the lavish lifestyle of his position and cared not for the details of the company's performance. By his decree Sony got rid of their senior engineers thinking new blood would invigorate the company, instead, the company purged its best talent, left them for headhunters from Samsung and LG to acquire them and outcompete them in the HDTV market. Sony made good TVs but they had razor thin profit margins and were expensive, Samsung and LG using Sony veterans managed to outcompete them on affordability and stronger profit margins.

Pretty much all Sony divisions were in the red, except their cameras still did quite well. VAIOs would be gone shortly after. By time 8th gen started kick off, or shortly after (forget when) Sony made a total commitment toward focusing their rebound on the PlayStation. It really helped them a great deal MS and Nintendo flubbed their 8th gen gaming market positions giving Sony the dominance it needed for the company to get on its feet.

The company is much better off than it was a decade or more ago, and that makes me have to consider, perhaps PlayStation isn't as necessary as it was to them a decade ago, and thus, not worth risking this full steam ahead approach we saw from them in previous years. Perhaps going forward they wish to take on a more balanced and conservative approach with their gaming division.

Perhaps when Jim Ryan commented this generation might be PlayStation's last, it was with that in mind. Perhaps he knew what they wanted from the division in order to be given considerable corporate resources, and perhaps this is why he took such issue with the ABK acquisition, and why he's been so pressing about pushing GaaS. That's not to say PlayStation is going anywhere, but perhaps Sony itself will see reason to not let the gaming division risk reversing their crawl out of potential ruin years earlier. He seems desperate to force a big gain for them in profitability because perhaps without it, I wonder if Sony could look at their gaming sector as less strategic in importance in future years.

I think these last two decades need to be reflected upon why what's happening now is happening. Sure, PlayStation enjoys a fantastic market position, but with Microsoft investing tons to remain competitive, with Nintendo is the best shape it has been in for years, I'm not sure Sony is as committed to that fight in any manner which would threaten the stability they've gotten back for the whole company. And I think there's a reason they don't want to commit to it like they did in previous years.

Sony has the only system worth owning right now, so obviously not. Every gen we see the lems in third place making Sony is doomed threads while PlayStation owners play the best games. I did it for the last two gens, so I understand. When you have nothing to play on your Xbox you become indignant and Lash out at the people who made better decisions by not buying an Xbox. It’s pretty much par for the course.

You mean those games that Microsoft are too afraid to take off of Playstation because they know it would be a financial disaster? Damn, it's hilarious to know despite MS's money, that Playstation is STILL cucking Xbox 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Sony's still getting their 30 percent cut from MS. Get that money!

Translated

SW has spoken and the official line after recent polls is...

PlayStation is going downhill and the worst next gen console

Its just loss after loss for the last placers

@BenjaminBanklin: You expect MS to pull COD from PS?😂 I guess you were also expecting Sony to pull Destiny from Xbox.🤭

Does that answer your question? lolol Poo cows. :P

@lamprey263: For sure, bleak as Sony's situation might look to a layperson. Sony has been through worse in the early days of the PS3 and if Nintendo survived the Wii U, Sony can survive these draughts. Sony has built up a lot of goodwill with the late days of the PS3 and the PS4. That tailwind will help them without a doubt.

The biggest challenge for Sony is not internal, but external. The Switch is one of Nintendos best consoles and Microsoft's investments are paying off. Phone gaming is devouring the market, and PC gaming is further taking in more of what remains of the traditional video game market.

LMAO ps5 fastest selling console going down hill. spiderman 2 getting great reviews and sales.

lets see which sells more starfield or spiderman2.

wait lets see call of duty sales for each console even though its a xbox studio now.

ps3 worse sony console sales wise still managed to pull ahead of 360 sales.

sony needs just one reveal show to pull the numbers again.

thing is people needs to expect a little drought. in 3 years sony release hfw2,god of war 2,gt7,ratchet and clank,returnal,last of us remake,sack boy,spiderman2,horizan call of the mountain,psvr2,demon souls and more that I cant think about right now. plus all the ps5 version of ps4 games.

thats 3 years.

what more do gamers expect in 3 years?

lets count how many first party games nin and xbox has released in 3 years.

not even close.

sony has released all of there big guns first few years of the ps5. now people hate them because they expect more from sony.

yeah telll me when xbox catches up in game sales and console sales

and more AAA first party games.

Sony fannies agree with the current state of Sony.🙃

I hate to break it to ya.

But the Nintendo Switch has been outpacing the PS5. At this point in time the Switch had sold about 50 million units. vs the PS5's 40 million.

This doesnt change the fact that Sony is doing fine. But there is no need for misinformation.

Sorry ment sony's fastest selling console.

fact is nin made switch to compete with ps4 sales. not ps5 even though its the same gen of consoles.

nin did not say lets release the switch to compete with ps5.

@Maroxad: it's not even bleak for the company as a whole, but solely regarding the consoles dominance and the market share split, compared to the split they enjoyed 8th gen, and it's not even bad, it's just a more competitive playing field. The PlayStation console brand will be fine long term, Sony as a company needs to hedge its bets with across multiple divisions, but I mainly think Sony as a whole will take a more conservative approach to investment in the gaming area. I mention their comeback from financially dire position the company was in during the entire 7th gen, it wasn't with PlayStation but the whole business was on fire and it was bleeding billions.

Yes, they come back from worse, my point there is the consideration of finally having built themselves back up to have stability within the company, to go back on what you point to with this disconnect between the layman and business prospective, the gamer is going to see Sony as having all these resources to commit toward crushing the competition they're not using, the corporate people have to think about having balanced investments across their multiple divisions. What the gamers want, corporate has to weigh risks putting the stability they earned back into jeopardy again.

And like you point out, lot of Sony's issues are external. Obviously the top executives will take that into consideration, and want to gauge where they stand in market parity and where they'll need to make investments and how much it'll cost them. Nintendo has a handheld market on lockdown. Microsoft has their UWP ecosystem, Game Pass services serving multiple avenues (console, PC, cloud, mobile), and then they have to measure will they want to invest considerable resources to keep pace.

I'd have to imagine this creates a butting of heads between PlayStation leadership with Sony's broader corporate leadership. And probably why we saw Sony come late to the table to address their shortcomings. They started investing in companies that do remasters and PC ports, companies that create online games, etc. This is stuff they mocked Microsoft for being proactive about but now their response is late, panicked, unfocused, and messy. Their PC ports are of questionable quality, lack meaningful revenue generation, and bogging down their internal talent. They have no PC-console ecosystem to sell their PS Plus subscription services to, they can't seem to manage getting their live service endeavors off to any meaningful start yet. This is going to cause corporate to consider whether they want to invest more and more money toward growth in the gaming division to address these shortcomings, gauging where the competition is, what Sony needs to accomplish to keep pace, and I think they're choosing stability for the company over the full steam ahead approach they took a decade ago, because back then they didn't have a choice, it was risky, thankfully MS and Nintendo left the door wide open at the time for that to work.

Perhaps the genius of Microsoft UWP approach, Game Pass, and providing content across multiple avenues wasn't necessarily just a pivot to further compete with Sony outside the narrow console metrics of success, it was a mind-game with Sony executive leadership to question would they want to sacrifice their money to keep pace. These moves weren't done to monopolize a market Sony had on lockdown, it was to redefine it.

In hindsight, Sony's game division had every opportunity to be set up to be in better position if they took action earlier. When MS offered BC, the UWP ecosystem, Game Pass and then adding day one first party titles, they had no response to those incremental developments, they felt they they had to much of an advantage to even bother trying, the fanboys encouraged compalcency by laughing at the thought Sony should even try. When they finally came to realization perhaps these are areas they need to invest in growing, it became too much to do, too late to do it.

That's why their plans have been so sloppy lately IMO, they're trying to do too much at once with too little resources, too little infrastructure, too little money. They got their vanguard developers bogged down making PC ports of old PS titles and GaaS titles they hit the reset button on if it isn't on track to be the next GTA Online, Roblox, Fortnite, etc, nor their celebrated single player story driven games with its exceptional quality they're best known for.

I'm not trying to point a bleak picture. Like I said before they'll be fine, even if they have to survive on their royalties from multiplatdorm third party games, they'll be fine. My assumption is they just need more money to grow, to build more of a PC-console ecosystem, add their subscription services to a wider audience of PC gamers, have teams to port their first party catalog to PC. They won't be getting it from corporate, the gaming division has to fund it through their own revenue generation. It takes time to get there, took Microsoft a decade to get their model to where it is now, could be years for Sony keep pace, and that's a big IF whether they'll even try. PlayStation leadership is on tunnel vision with GaaS like many many publishers have been corrupted by the prospect of a phenomenal money spigot.

The whole of gaming has gone downhill. The market has become an economically unreliable garbage cluster.

When Layden says, AAA+ has become unsustainable, he has of course the companys point of view in mind. The reality is, the market doesn't provide the stability for big budget games anymore. Too much trash releases, trash competition etc.

What a convenient and simple explanation.

@palasta: "What a convenient and simple explanation."

For clarification, I don't think Sony is GaaS focused because one day leadership said "we're doing really well, but we can be doing soooo much better", and let greed trounce the strategy they built their success on. Rather, I feel this is perhaps prompted by larger corporate considerations. They have to balance their corporate considerations across all divisions, and can't let one division raid the corporate coffers, and not after spending a decade climbing away from that verge of bankruptcy.

If an in depth expose ever gets done I'm sure the Bungie acquisition will be at the center of it. At first I thought the Bungie acquisition wasn't a tit-for-tat to counter the ABK acquisition announcement, now I'm not so sure. Initially I thought it played into their previous growth strategy to expand their online game capabilities, less about buying an IP like Destiny. I did think the $3.7 billion price tag was obviously way too high, but perhaps overpaid for an expedited resolution over bigger concerns to stabilize Sony stock price (as it started faltering in response to the ABK acquisition announcement).

Regardless of the why they spent $3.7 billion to buy Bungie, I imagine corporate wanted good reason to know why they thought this would be a good investment, wanted a road map from SIE going forward to stick to, and set constraints and targets years out to hit . I think in a rush, they pitched the too-good-to-be-true intoxicating allure of the GaaS big payout just to get corporate to say yes, whether SIE leadership believed in that plan or not, but simply to secure the deal, for market optics, but then in doing so, corporate set rigid constraints to stick to the plan they pitched them.

I'm now thinking what we see here is SIE, even if they wanted do things differently, even if they wanted to be more fluid in their strategy, they can't, they tied their hands with corporate to get the deal done. And even if they want to reverse course within SIE, they can't, corporate won't let them, their stuck down this path. I'm thinking this is perhaps why Jim Ryan made a huge fuss with regulators, and though he made up a lot of baloney to stop it, I think there was some truth when he talked about the broader importance of being able to fund their internal development. Of course, the excuse COD royalties paid for that by themselves is perhaps misdirection. I'm thinking this big worry is true, but stems from the constraints Jim Ryan created within SIE when they got Sony to pay that sizeable sum for the Bungie acquisition.

If this is true, there's going to be a whole lot of hurt awaiting ahead, because if this is the case, they'll still be stuck on a rigid GaaS path until a course correction is done. I don't see this happening until SIE gets new leadership, and Jim Ryan is still many months away from stepping down. From there, they'll get their new leadership, corporate will want to hear about state of SIE and their path for growth in GaaS. So, depends on how the new leadership sees things. An inept one might say "oh yeah, still full steam ahead with GaaS, we're in great shape making progress, just need more time". Or they might say "Jim Ryan was an inept tool, I've inhereted a nightmare, we need to get off this GaaS path". And corporate either responds giving SIE the flexibility to switch strategy, but even that's going to have variable outcomes like do they: dole out financial support for a strong pivot; tell them to make do with what resources they're allotted; totally clip their nuts off. Should be an interesting development to see play out to say the least.