In a leaked Sony Interactive Entertainment presentation, the company declares that including first-party games on PS Plus has had a “big” effect on “traditional sales.” As an example, the company mentioned that Horizon Forbidden West‘s sales “flat-lined” immediately after being added to PS Plus.
A job listing published by the UK studio reveals that its next project will be another entirely new IP.
Good. Something not boring, not one of those "make your own game" crap and also on Steam would be nice.
Outriders developer People Can Fly's next game has been canceled after its publishing agreement with Take-Two Interactive fell through.
"the capital group of PCF Group S.A."
If you're getting funding from a group that needs two different ways of Acronyming itself, things will not go the way you want them to.
Outriders was crap. They slapped that game together and threw in a loot system to get players' attention. This game was absolutely jank and the always online nonsense made it stutter like crazy. People Can't Optimize.
I liked Outriders but I could see where the artistic vision was compromised. The way the industry is now, it wouldn't surprise me that upper management would scrap something that didn't pull in money via gaas, mts, or other means.
The new Escape from Tarkov Unheard Edition has the community in an outrage after promising exclusive access to the new PvE mode for $250 USD.
$250? Do they not know all the other games that already exist or will be made in the future that can do similar?
This is for the hardcore people that have 2500 h in the game. They basically play that one game the whole year.
Oh and those same people are mad as hell at this... what a way to reward fans of your game and annihilate newcomers.
Read a comment earlier calling it a "special monetization operation." I had to chuckle at that.
That's smart Sony knows what's up with that.
Clank was profitable after all
Also really interesting to see through to one of the sites they link to (Resetera) that the 2 cross gen titles in Miles Morales and Ghosts of Tsushima sold over 40% each of their first year in year 2, almost double what even the best performing games like GOW 2018 and Spider-Man did. Kinda seeing the cold hard numbers makes it really clear why they did cross gen games and remastered some of the later PS4 games to PS5 Directors Cuts.
"“In year 1, Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West were very comparable,” the presentation reads. “HFW was included into PS Plus at the start of Year 2. HFW saw an enormous influx of PS Plus players, but at the cost of flat-lining the game activations from retail sales.”"
So, the data shows there were fewer traditional sales, but it doesn't show us anything about how many people joined PS+? It does say there was an influx of HFW players, but it doesn't state how many of these players owned PS+ to begin with.
To conclude that it negatively sales is correct, but it doesn't mean less money is made. We cannot draw that conclusion until we know how many more people joined PS+ because of HFW.
MS's bet is that although it lowers traditional sales, it makes the services more appealing and millions of new people will subscribe if they see that good games are added to the service. And in the end, the subscription profit (not revenue) will outpace that of the traditional sales.
However even after 6 years they still haven't reached that point lmao