If you shouldn’t count on Sony’s number 2 to betray secrets, especially when the group’s management plans to reconsider the strategy of its video game activity on May 26, Hiroko Totoki spoke about recurring questions concerning the production capacity of the PS5, Sony’s ever-increasing investments in video games and the situation of PlayStation Plus.
If the agreement to acquire Bungie for more than 3 billion euros was announced on January 31, it will potentially be necessary to wait until the end of the year before it is finalized. According to Sony’s CFO and barring unexpected obstacles from regulators, Bungie will become part of the PlayStation family as a subsidiary sometime in the last quarter of 2022 and not before.
Remember that this acquisition will not change anything for the players since Destiny 2 and even the studio’s future productions will remain multiplatform, a data displayed in complete transparency by the two players concerned as soon as the announcement of their merger.
The acquisition of Bungie is accompanied by the more modest one of Haven, a young Montreal studio formed by Jade Raymond and other veterans of Ubisoft, Electronic Arts and Google Stadia. Added to these acquisitions is the fact that Sony has planned to increase its investment in its current studios and games. For the current fiscal year, PlayStation Studios will be entitled to 290 million euros (40 billion yen) more than the previous year. Remember that video games have been the Japanese group’s most lucrative business for a few years now. And to go higher, the manufacturer no longer intends to ignore the PC and the mobile, as the following comment implies:
In the future, we want to develop the games activity by strengthening our offer of games developed by our studios and by deploying these games on multiple platforms.
After having distributed 11.5 million PlayStation 5 between April 2021 and March 2022 (against 23 million Switch, for comparison), Sony plans to put 18 million consoles on the market by March 2023, which would allow the park to PS5 to approach 40 million next spring. As Hiroki Totoki explains, this objective of 18 million is not formulated in a haphazard way and is based on the visibility it has on the availability of components. Of course, it is still necessary that no external factor comes to disturb the plans, in particular the risk of an extension of the pandemic in China.
Another important detail, even if going from 11.5 million to 18 million consoles represents a significant improvement, it does not mean that everyone will have their PS5 in the coming months. “18 million units is what we think we can get in parts and components, but we think the demand is a bit higher than that. And so if the question is can we keep up with the demand, I think we’re still a bit short“, comments Totoki.
On this point, note that the situation has already started to improve since last month for the Sony console. After a really sluggish first quarter of 2022, the PS5 recovered and sold better than the Switch and the Xbox Series in the UK in April, as just confirmed by the Games Industry site. Regarding the United States, we will know what is happening this Friday with the next monthly publication of the NPD.
While PlayStation is posting record results for the fiscal year, the number of PlayStation Plus subscribers now seems to be stagnating. Over the past three months, it has even fallen from 48 million to 47.4 million, just as the play time of PlayStation users has fallen from the peak seen during the months of confinement. A fluctuation which is not alarming for Hiroki Totoki, who recalls that new formulas will soon appear to give new impetus to the subscription.
New formulas that show promise, but not to the point of offering Premium subscribers new PlayStation Studios productions from the day of their release, as Microsoft does with its Game Pass. A point that CEO Jim Ryan had already had the opportunity to comment on and on which rebounds today the financial director of Sony, also concerned about the impact that such a strategy could have on the very nature of the big productions that the finance society today.
“I will refrain from commenting on the strategy of the competition, but our current method is to make appropriate investments in development and R&D to deliver quality products, which improves our platform and also long-term business. If we distribute the AAA titles on the PlayStation 5 through a subscription service, we may need to reduce our investments, which will deteriorate the quality of our titles and that is what concerns us.“
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