Rumor: Sony Reversing Course On Live Service Games With Help From Sega And Bandai Namco

gameranx.com:

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