Sony's focus on engagement time over units sold makes sense for PlayStation | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Sony announced its full-year results for 2023 earlier this week, with the PlayStation business posting continued solid growth that was basically in line with its revised estimates from a few months ago, albeit significantly undershooting the sky-high estimates it had originally forecast at the start of the year.

As ever, there were various interesting bits and pieces in the results – I'm personally always struck by the long-term story Sony's financials tell of PlayStation's ever-growing dominance of the company's business – but the aspect of the annual financial report that seems to have stirred up the most interest is not in the substance of the details reported, but rather in their framing.

Specifically, during the results presentation, Sony senior vice president Naomi Matsuoka discussed the growth of operating income in the Games & Network Services division which houses PlayStation by mentioning a shift in internal strategic thinking – away from unit sales and hardware attach rate, and towards metrics of time spent on the console and its services.

In framing the business in this way, the company sparked off an admittedly predictable storm in the commentariat, who are hair-trigger primed to expect the worst from companies in terms of live-service and monetisation strategies when they hear terms like this.

In this instance, though, I think the concerns whipped up by Sony's statements missed the mark by quite a margin. People are understandably worried that a shift away from looking at unit sales and towards measuring engagement time instead will create a set of perverse incentives for Sony that will erode its interest in selling monolithic games that don't have a service component, for example – which would certainly be a great loss, since that's arguably the thing that Sony does best, and its first-party output in that category has been the solid backbone of PlayStation for more than a decade.

Unit sales no longer capture the PlayStation business in its totality

However