There’s a new rumor going around about what is going on behind the scenes at Sony.
We had been recently reporting on confirmed rumors that PlayStation veteran Connie Booth had recently left the company. This had been connected to Jim Ryan’s pending retirement, and the broader situation going on behind the scenes for PlayStation, and parent company Sony.
If you’re a gamer, you would think Sony is firing on all cylinders. Sony, indeed, has created momentum for PlayStation 5 to be the leader of the current console generation. Their first party game output has also turned out to be some of the best reviewed and profitable games of the generation. And of course, third party games have been selling more on PlayStation 5 than other platforms and PC, and Sony makes a lot of money from that too.
This report from Nikkei paints a different picture, however. Nikkei is reporting on the pending introduction of Hiroki Totoki, who is already Sony Group President, as PlayStations’ next CEO. Nikkei explains that Sony may be seeing a lot of revenue coming in for PlayStation, but because of their high spend on acquisitions and game development, they are actually making less profits overall.
A lot of that investment went not only into acquiring studios like Insomniac and Bungie, but in the large development costs of their first party titles. Their games aren’t selling as much units to make those heavy investments worthwhile. Furthermore, even as PlayStation 4 console sales continue to rise, they are also not at the level Sony needs to make their money back.
Of course, the big elephant in the room here is that a lot of those investments were for making live service games or GAAS. While Sony has yet to release any of these games, investors are already having cold feet seeing that recent service games releases haven’t been profitable.
As Nikkei reports, PlayStation is expected to make 12.5 % in return on invested capital, far from the 47.5 % return they were projected to make when they planned these investments 3 years ago. There is also a narrative that PlayStation gets to act too independently from Sony management. This move by Totoki could be a measure to put a stop to that.
And so we enter the realm of speculation. Resetera user Head on the Block made these posts that have been spreading online like wildfire:
“I think Sega and Bandai are working on a Sony IP
Almost every studio you listed here is or was working on an online game, some forced to really.
Scuttlebutt is, Sony is reversing course and using third party to catch up on some IPs.
I heard Sega has a hand in an old IP that’ll Wipe the floor. But again, with things “turning around” as rumored, it’s going to be at least 4 years until some of these changes are seen.”
We can’t vouch for the veracity of this rumor. Having said that, its worth discussing these claims and what they could possibly mean.
Sony has had good third party relationships with Sega and Namco Bandai. If Sony is reviving some old IPs they have, they are apparently not going to be live service games.
It’s also highly likely that these games are also single player experiences, and they could possibly also be changed to become open world games. Examples of dormant PlayStation owned IP that could fit this category include Sly Cooper, Dark Cloud, The Mark of Kri, Heavenly Sword, and Alundra.
It is easy to see Sega and Namco Bandai making successful big budget revivals of such games. But as to whether they can get Sony back into a place where their investments pay off is a different matter. At least these won’t be as costly to Sony, if the rumor is true anyway. It’ll be interesting to see if this really was Sony’s chosen course of action, or if they could be looking at something else.
