7 things we just learned about Sony’s big PlayStation 5 plans

Sony recently held an investor briefing where it painted an incredibly rosy picture of the PlayStation 5 and its future prospects. Despite recent layoffs And failing to meet its sales targets for 2023the company seems convinced that the console’s best days are yet to come.

Much of this valuation seems based on prospects for big games coming in the coming years, as well as PlayStation’s ability to absorb ever more spending from its most loyal players. The PS5 market may not be expanding, but the amount of money PS5 owners will be pumping into the ecosystem certainly seems to be growing.

Here are a bunch of things we learned from Presentation of May 29 by soon-to-be-promoted co-CEOs Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino.

The PS5 is Sony’s most profitable console generation to date

The PS5 may be slightly behind the PS4 in total lifetime sales worldwide (it’s ahead in the US), but Sony has revealed that those who have upgraded are spending big. PS5 players spent an average of $731 on the new platform, compared to $580 for PS4 players at a similar time in the console cycle. At the halfway point, the PS5 generation’s revenue stands at $106 billion in sales and $10 billion in operating income (profit), which is about the same as what the PS4 achieved during its full seven-year life cycle.

This success is due in part to the continued popularity of the old console. About half the player base is still on PS4, although PS5 players play nearly twice as many hours in total as their last-gen counterparts. It makes sense that the most loyal players are the ones who upgrade, but it has certainly eroded the idea that modern console generations are discrete cycles rather than platform continuations like on PC and smartphones .

The PC still won’t have big, up-to-date single-player games

While Helldiverse 2 is the best-selling game of the year so far thanks to its simultaneous arrival on PS5 and PC, Sony has no plans to start offering games like Wolverine day and date on Steam. This seems to be reserved for live service games like those from Firewalk Studios. Concordexpected later this year, and Bungie’s Marathonscheduled for release in 2025.

Hulst said the company would continue to take a “more strategic” approach with its “flagship titles” by giving PC gamers a taste of its console-exclusive franchises with ports close to when a sequel is about to be released. to go out. “We are finding new audiences who will potentially be very interested in the sequels on the PlayStation platform,” he said. That’s hard to believe given that die-hard Steam fans are infamous for waiting years to play new blockbusters instead of purchasing them from competing stores like Epic Games.

Microtransactions are eating away at game sales

Total spending may increase on PS5, but a lot of it goes to the same top 10 live service games like Fortnite And Apex Legends. Spending on full games was down 12% on PS5 compared to PS4, despite prices rising up to $70. Spending on DLC, battle passes and cosmetics increased by 176% this generation of consoles. It’s not hard to see how this translates into a more difficult landscape for new games, or why so many publishers are obsessed with creating the next one. Grand Theft Auto Online Or GenshinImpact. However, Sony’s proprietary games continue to sell well: Spider-Man 2 has now sold over 11 million copies.

More PS Plus subscribers are upgrading

PS Plus is more complicated and more expensive than ever, but it seems to be working for Sony so far. Although the total number of subscriptions hasn’t changed drastically, more regular PS Plus subscribers are moving up to the Extra and Premium tiers. The Extra tier, which includes the free game library, grew 16% last year, and the Premium tier, which includes access to PlayStation Classics and cloud streaming, grew 19%. This seems to fit the theme that if you can’t grow your audience, just sell it as much as you can before it burns out.

PS VR2 who?

One thing that doesn’t seem to be growing is Sony’s virtual reality headset market. No one asked about PS VR2 during the meeting and it wasn’t directly addressed anywhere in the presentation. Instead, VR headsets are grouped into a general category of “peripherals” alongside headsets and PlayStation Portal handhelds.

Even though gamer spending on peripherals has increased by 34% since the PS4 console generation, it still represents the smallest share of the total. Sony has not disclosed how many headsets it has shipped and would have stopped production until it can empty the existing inventory. VR just doesn’t seem to be a significant part of Sony’s roadmap at the moment.

Sony has not abandoned mobile

Last year, Sony predicted that half of its releases in 2025 would be on PC and mobile. So far, no new games have been launched on smartphones. They arrive, however, as part of a strategy to reach new audiences and use that money to subsidize the investment needed to develop the main franchises on console. “On mobile, we’ve worked hard to establish a very strong, very experienced core mobile team,” Hulst said. “We’re taking a more measured approach compared to the more aggressive approach you’ve seen on PC, because PC is closer to the core of our development than mobile.”

Live play remains the goal

At one point, Hust was asked about the status of Bungie, which laid off 100 people last year amid plummeting Destiny 2 numbers. He confirmed that the studio is not expected to contribute to Sony’s profits this year, in part due to continued investments in Marathon. At the same time, he said “significant progress” had been made with integration into the rest of PlayStation. That sounds terrifying to longtime Bungie fans, but Hulst said the studio has been invaluable in getting the rest of the company up to speed on game development as a service. It called these “optimizations” of its production pipelines for these types of games the main goal of the acquisition in the first place.

Will this bear fruit? It appears that only a half-dozen live service projects initially in development at one time or another are still moving forward. Sci-fi shooter Concord is part of. Fairgame$, Haven’s attempt at the multiplayer heist genre, is another. Neon Koi, Sony’s mobile games studio, is also listed in the Live Service Focus section of its presentation. Guerrilla Games, meanwhile, is in the “Evolution/Multi-Genre” section, and we know it’s working on multiplayer spin-offs of Horizon Zero Dawn.

It is interesting to note that Bend Studio, which made The days gone by, is in the same category, which suggests that its next project could also have a multiplayer component. It remains to be seen whether any of these live service games can supplant those already consuming so much oxygen on PlayStation. With microtransaction spending having seen the strongest growth since the PS4 generation, it’s easy to see why Sony wants to try.