Sony is seemingly being investigated by the Romanian Competition Council over potential PlayStation dominance abuse in the market.
The move was made “in response to the lower profitability of the European region”
Honestly smart move, there's enough pvp, operator/hero based pvp GAAS games with this same generic style out and upcoming.
That is really sad. Not only cancelling Hyenas, but the other unannounced game and cutting funds yet again for Creative Assembly. This would be the first time in a decade that Sega let those guys do something other than the Total War series and the last time this happened, Creative Assembly delivered one of the best horror experiences out there in the form of ALIEN: ISOLATION.
I get that profitability is low. But maybe it's because Creative Assembly has been stuck putting out yearly releases of the Total War series. Those games are great, don't get me wrong but the market is extremely saturated with them and they are limited in public as they are only available on PC and PC players are know for making their favourite titles last a long time. To the point that people are still playing Total War Shogun 2 from 2011 at reasonable numbers...
So I feel this is a very bad move. It basically boxes the studio in a situation where they are unlikely to improve their profitability. Now not only they will go back to the same yearly franchise, but they will have to do that with a lower budget and likely team as well.
The problem with Total War is that they (CA) themselves saturate the series to death. Out of the last 5 Total War games I felt only Three Kingdoms was presenting new bold ideas. Troy, Britannia, Rome Remastered and Warhammer 3 all felt sloppy or lazy.
That is the issue with yearly releases. There is no way a company could manage that and create original and innovative content for each entry. It's a pretty much mutually exclusive situation. And why this cancellations and cuts just sucks. Now TW is literally everything this studio has but with less budget and likely fewer people to work on each entry.
So if you thought their last releases were sloppy or lazy. I would expect that to get even worse and then I would be surprised if Sega closes them, just like they did Creative Assembly Australia before.
Can't understand how it would save them money.
If the game was basically finished then surely release it and get a little cash. Surely the money has been spent already and now the easy bit is to release it. ?
It was supposed to be an online only game that gets updates for years. These would have cost em more than the development so far probably if the game bombs
They could have canceled it months ago already after seeing the reaction to the trailer(s). Nobody was caring or hyped about this.
MiHoYo's concerted efforts to promote HSR to Genshin Impact's existing player base, as well as collaborations with Genshin Impact influencers who switched their focus to HSR, have been witnessed by the gaming community. While leveraging an existing player base is a sound strategy, it's important to remember that both HSR and Genshin Impact require significant time and financial investments from players.
Jim Ryan has departed Sony Interactive Entertainment, after roughly 30 years at the company.
Less live service nonsense, I hope. Maybe more than one or two first-party releases a year would be nice as well. It'd be nice if they fixed the PS+ price hike too, but that's less likely because the only reason they would have increased the price in the first place is if it wasn't making them enough money to satisfy shareholders.
We won't see the real effects of Jim leaving for another 2-3 years and it all depends on who is replacing him.
With how much money they make, I really doubt we'll see the end of Live Service experiments at Sony. Even if it's last few have been... under-whelming.
@crazyCoconuts @Crows90
Sony's definition of live service is pretty broad. Stuff like Gran Turismo 7 and MLB The Show count for them. Helldivers 2 will count. I'm not sure if they're including Marathon or Destiny 2 as Bungie remains seperate from Playstation Studios
@plague, sorry man, that's reaching. Has Sony actually followed through with any real life service games?
Oh please, the last ps+ price hike was 6 years ago in 2017 while Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime etc. raise their price nearly every year.
Unlike those services, the PS+ price hike wasn't by dollar amount, it was by percentage. Across the board the prices for each PS+ tier increased about 30%. The lowest tier went up by way less than the highest tier. It's a clear money-grab, especially when they haven't even offered more Classics to warrant the huge increase on the Premium tier.
Also, unrelated, but it's still bad when those other services increase the price of their subscriptions as well, so I don't understand the use of this argument.
"a clear money grab"- how is that clear? They were already MUCH cheaper than their competition in terms of annual so they brought that a little more in line. I think they were losing money on that $99/year Extra plan in my guestimation
There's no way they would buy Bungie for the life service stuff to drop those plans after this guy leaves.
"We won't see the real effects of Jim leaving for another 2-3 years and it all depends on who is replacing him."
I believe we´ll have news regarding the future of Playstation rather sooner than later.
As Ryan steps down next month, demands for what´s next for Playstation will not only be made by gamers, but shareholders, investors and board directors.
PS games on PC will still to be a thing? Will those games come to PC sooner or even later?
Day One Playstation games on PS Plus will be a thing? Will those games be released sooner on the service? There´ll be AAA third party day one releases on the service?
GaaS will continue to be a focus?
Will Playstation continue and invest in third party exclusives?
Will Playstation establish new partnerships with Microsoft and or Nintendo?
Will Playstation continue and invest in acquisition of studios? Will they now invest in publishers as well?
There will be more PSVR2 games from first party studios?
There´s lots of questions that needs to be addressed by the new leadership.
Of course, Totoki also might answer all of it with a single note: "All of Playstation future plans and direction, remains the same" and call it a day.
***“prohibiting the sale of game activation codes video compatible with PlayStation consoles by competing distributors.“***
Ah, Amazon being greedy bastards comes back to bite Sony in the arse. Sony moved to PSN charge cards only because Amazon was pushing and bullying Sony into giving Amazon much cheaper digital game codes (didn't allow pre-order of PS digital game codes and promoted retail heavily over digital) than other storefronts. So, they just stopped offering digital codes. Now it's anti-competitive even though Sony offers PSN game cards to everyone equally.
This will be interesting to watch. If this sees Sony having to provide game activation codes (I don't think it will), then I see Sony only doing it in B&M stores and removing online distributors from it.
Just to note, this has squat to do with anything about market reach or the like. Solely the old issue of them offering only PSN charge cards and not digital game codes.
I actually liked it better when I could go on Amazon and buy the code. Found way more deals back then