Despite the controversy surrounding Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade, Sony's Business Segment Meeting 2024 took place from May 30-31 led by Hideaki Nishino, SVP, Platform Experience, and Hermen Hulst, SVP, head of PlayStation Studios from Sony Interactive Entertainment, and the outcome from the meeting was naturally positive.

It appears like Sory is putting a lot of effort into Live Service games, although we all know that certain major Sony studios such as Insomniac Games, Housemarque, Naughty Dog, Santa Monica Studios, Sucker Punch Productions, and Team ASOBI will stick to single-player and narrative action games. It's not too hard to guess that since Naughty Dog's Last of Us multiplayer spin-off and Insomniac's Spider-Man multiplayer game were both canceled, as is well known.

The good news is that these teams are now concentrating solely on the activities that they excel at, single-player games. But the fact that Sucker Punch Productions is also included in this category is something that we find to be rather intriguing. As much potential as Ghost of Tsushima: Legends Multiplayer has, we had anticipated it would be developed further into a full game.

However, being a small AAA studio, they likely require entire concentration on the massive open-world single-player title prior to anything else. The reason is, that Sony also has a studio division that incorporates multiple genres and is always expanding. Studios like Guerrilla Games, which is developing both the online game Horizon and the third single-player release, are juggling two genres at once.

Aside from that, Bend Studio seems to be branching out beyond their single-player game. Their next AAA live-service game will contain open-world elements similar to Days Gone, but it will also have multiplayer capabilities and support for content added after the game launches. Along with studios that focus solely on Live Service, they also provide a section for partner studios; for example, Valkyrie Entertainment has been a support studio for NIXXES, and they handle all the major PC ports. Most recently, they assisted Santa Monica Studio on the God of War games.

Since we last heard that Bluepoint Games was working on unique content rather than a complete recreation, it's intriguing to see them here as well. Since they won't be playing a role in the single-player story, the developers may decide to incorporate their ideas into the game's remake.

Possibly anything having to do with Bloodborne, or perhaps they are creating some fresh Uncharted material as they construct a new Uncharted. You might recall that Sony TV commercial when Nathan's daughter was used to tease Uncharted. It'll be surprising if we don't see a new Uncharted game within this PlayStation 5 generation; since Sony even showed Uncharted as a key series again and said they want to increase audience reach and engagement with new concepts and experiences.

One more intriguing statistic that was brought up during the meeting is that half of the monthly active players are still on PlayStation 4. This likely explains why Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is still launching on old-gen platforms. Having said that, PlayStation 5 users do play more games than PlayStation 4 users. It's no surprise that these are the most dedicated gamers who also purchase the new games.

Even while the revenue margins did decline significantly in the past two years, the PlayStation 5 has already surpassed the PlayStation 4 in terms of overall revenue after four years. Because Sony is currently making significant investments in Live Service games, the price of the major games that the company puts out is, of course, significantly higher. Sony intends to reduce the production costs of its large AAA single-player games without compromising on quality by utilizing AI and outsourcing development to low-cost locations.

As we saw with Concord during Sony State of Play May 2024, and even though it wasn't remarkable; they have confirmed their commitment to releasing all of their live service games on PC on launch day. However, PC versions of single-player games will be delayed. In an effort to entice PC gamers to switch to PlayStation for the sequels. Although that is reasonable in theory, is that effective?

Now that it has been reported that God of War Ragnarok will be released on PC in September 2024, would these individuals really wait for this long to be able to play the game on their preferred platform and actually purchase a console for the price of $500 to play the game? Sony may not have proof that this occurs, but they did tell us that, on average, PlayStation 5 users spend $731 on additional PlayStation peripherals and games. 

So, they're likely considering the trade-off: the game will sell less on PC if it doesn't launch on day one, but we can make more money off of console buyers than PC buyers alone. Sony will likely keep this pattern going since they are pleased with how things are going. The primary obstacle they must overcome is reducing the price of their flagship single-player games. We now know they're working on a lot of them, so maybe a showcase later this year might reveal some of them.

We'd like to see more single-player games on PlayStations since Sony has truly been great in this segment. But their focus on Live Service games could be a bit worrying for PlayStation fans, especially when games like Concord come onto the scene. No, we haven't played Concord, not seen much of its details yet, but it's called a gamer's hunch. Our intuition hardly deceives and we know when it's going to be a good game or not when revealed. We weren't wrong about Stellar Blade despite some large media's disapproval, and we aren't about the Live Service games either. We can only hope that Sony gets it right with their plan to build ongoing franchises that engage multiple audiences.
 

Sarwar Ron (@SarwarRon)
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