Sony has a few pillars it focuses on to turn revenue, and one of those key pillars is video games. PlayStation has been known for delivering narrative-driven single-player games over the years. But now it looks like Sony is keen on changing things up with a new incentive of bringing out live service games. A new report has surfaced online from Nikkei that highlights Sony adding a whopping $2.13 billion towards the research and development for their game segment.
This is no small number, and it accounts for 40% of Sony’s total research and development spending. But according to Nikkei, this all boils down to ensuring that Sony makes a strong footprint in live service games. It’s an area that they struggle within, and they started their venture into this area with the purchase of Bungie. Now having the makers behind the Destiny franchise at their disposal, it looks like they are expanding in a major way. Again, the report goes on to state that Sony is striving to ensure they have twelve live service game titles within their portfolio within the fiscal year ending within March of 2026.
That is quite the collection of titles, and you can speculate that Sony is seeking to gamble at this venture. We could see Sony striving to produce these titles in hopes that at least one would take off and turns out to be a major money maker for Sony. Of course, we don’t know just how well these games will end up being until they are released. Some of these games might not last very long in the marketplace either, so again, we’ll just have to wait and see what titles end up sticking.
Another aspect worth bringing in is whether these live service games will be attached to already established IPs or if Sony would opt to deliver new franchises for this strategy. At any rate, this was not the only thing Nikkei reported on, as it looks like Sony also wants to break further into the metaverse. Just as the publication noted, we might see more attention focused on the metaverse purely due to the upcoming Apple Vision Pro headset that is coming out into the marketplace next year. But with Apple Vision Pro, you’re looking at over $3,000, which might be tough for most consumers to stomach.
