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Horizon is also very high, no?
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Sales numbers for every PS4 and PS5 era PlayStation first party games have been leaked
Horizon is also very high, no?
Tbf the Nintendo hack was data from past game archives they saved in some old file, which old partners leaked them if I remember correctly. These recent leaks are stuff planned for the future, which is more deadly.
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There's an even better slide later that compares the revenue loss in a year 2 title. Its 70% cannibilisation, in year 2!
Imagine the cannibilisation rate at launch.
My prior estimates from Halo/Gears/Forza UK/US sales estimates pointed to a roughly 70-80% cannibilisation rate.
It also seems like PS Studios used HFW and Rift Apart as a test to see how PS+ economics would work.
It is, but I was less surprised by that given that Horizon sold more than double God of War in terms of physical Japan sales.
There's also the matter that Sony released God of War Ragnarok at the end of 2022 compared to Zero Dawn getting that holiday to itself ( GT Sport released but GT7 released literally right next to Forbidden West so they cancel each other out) and it missing out on holiday bundles and early 2023 soft bundles because they swapped in God of War instead. If you look closely, you can see the flatlining starts at Christmas. Sony also did less discounting for Forbidden West.
I respect the CEO of Embracer, Lars Wingefors, for being honest with me in saying that Nintendo is the only one who can pull this off.
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Where did he say that? It's true but it's funny to openly admit to such.
Pavloving gamers to accept that on other systems will be the most difficult challenge of our gaming times
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It's a very casual-leaning IP from what I've seen. Anecdotically I also regularly see far more Aloy cosplays than any other PS character.
More evidence to support my public thesis that subscription services like Xbox Game Pass are 1 ) revenue negative to the industry and 2) likely loss-making
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When I met him in Stockholm. It was just me and him for like 2 hours while it stormed outside. He must be heartbroken with what is going on right now.
Wasn't Aloy in Genshin? That might have helped a little
Subscription models for old content and relatively inexpensive or devalued titles seems to be the best route. I have no idea how day one releases that cost $200m+ in dev costs and then require marketing could possibly become a norm with the current size of the industry. Sony has been vocal about not being able to do a gamepass type model. It seemed obvious why though I will admit MS so blatantly lying about gamepasses effect on sales definitely got me off my first thought of this not being a way forward.
MS will be interesting to watch. I really wonder what the gaming department financials look like when not buried with a bunch of other stuff.
My math suggests that you can't not lose money unless it's some long-lived game with ongoing monetization. And even then, it's still revenue-negative vs. an upfront fee.
Game economics are not movie economics. A $10 Netflix subscription needed to out-monetize a $5 Blockbuster rental. Game Pass needs to out-monetize a $70 unit sale. And the platforms make $21 on those sales - equivalent to about 2 months of a GP sub.
The gap between Nintendo and other platforms holders is bigger than I thought. Seems like they also made a good call on
how to engage with the subscription model and making sure that the audience knows what type of content you can't expect over there.
Not hating but i would consider this to be common knowledge in the industry.
how to engage with the subscription model and making sure that the audience knows what type of content you can't expect over there.
That's like respecting some one for telling you the sky is blue.
Not hating but i would consider this to be common knowledge in the industry.
A few more numbers as of Jan 2020:
Astro Bot VR (1.04m)
Everybody's Golf VR (460k)
Medievil Remake (504k)
Mod edit: we have a thread that goes over this data and doesn't host leaked pictures here
PlayStation's Cumulative Lifetime Weekly Sales Report - Week Ending January 12th, 2020 (PS4 Hardware and Software Units + Bundles)
Thanks to @MegaXZero for writing this out Data as of January 2020 Details Disc Retail, Bundled, and Digital Disc and Bundled sales are as of: SIEA: January 11, 2020 SIEE: January 12, 2020 SIEJA: January 12, 2020 Digital is as of: January 19, 2020 PS4 Install Base as of January 19, 2020...www.installbaseforum.com
This perfectly explains why Team Asobi is the studio Sony kept around from JS. They sold more of a VR title than the rest of Japan Studio sold flat screen games with less marketing
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I don't know too many CEOs who openly admit a competitor is much better than them. Do you?
What? BB sold over 7x Astrobot?
With subscription you can attract a consumer that would not pay $70 for a game.
In the end of the day there's no mistery, you need to gain for subscriptions more than your cost to develop and add games to the service.
It's not impossible to do that.
Bloodborne is a Fromsoft game.
You have missed all the points
Maybe I did, you said you can't not lose money, how come?
It's produced by Japan Studio. And the production division responsible was let go.
Look at Aqua's comprehensive PSN list from 2020 on page 1 though, Astrobot sold fewer units than most JP Studio titles digitally: BB, Knack 1-2, Mingol 7, TLG, SOTC, Gravity Rush 1-2, etc. The sales we're seeing here don't vindicate things in the way you're suggesting at all.
Here is some simple envelope math
A developer spends $200 million-$300 million to developing a game that it thinks will sell 5m-10m copies lifetime.
Average play time is about 25 hours. So the total engagement on 5m-10m units is about 125m to 250m hours. Given the 200 to 300 development cost, the development cost per hour equivalent is $1-$3 per hour. 250m in dev costs and 10 units sold at 25 hours of playtime is about $1 cost per engagement hour.
Now, let’s say that new game comes to market at $70
New users are paying about $2.80 per hour of engagement. If, at retail the game averages $35 lifetime then the average monetization per hour of engagement is $1.40.
Xbox is only charging you $10 a month for Game Pass. They also said they make about another $5 dollars per month in additional monetization from higher than average engagement. I think the average user plays about 40 hours a month.
So $15 per month in ARPU divided by 40 hours is less than $.40 per hour of engagement in monetization
So, a AAA title that
-at the high-end sells 10 million units
- and costs at the low end $250 million
has a higher per hour cost than revenue generated under the subscription model
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Phil Spencer does it all the time and he is actually competing with Nintendo on that platform holder level. No disrespect to Embracer but they aren't really on Nintendo level, so what else would they say ? Of course the company that is platform holders an publishes Mario, Pokemon and co. can do stuff other publishers can't.
Just doesn't feel like that big of a revelation to me.
Ok, I understand your logic and I agree that if a particularly game can sell 5-10 million units and isn't focused on MTX, standalone sales will gave more money than put on a subscription service.
But the point of this type of service is to attract and keep subscribers securing a recurrent revenue, so you can in an individualized analysis lose money in a X or Y game, but globally your subscription business is turning profits.
These types of AAA games are helping your service to thrive, that's an indirect gain that a simple math will not capture.
They really wasted something excellent with Evolution Studios. Driveclub pulled weight and is still impressive now. Death Stranding on the PS4 alone did excellently, so a lot of the early assumptions on the early performance leaning toward bad gets washed away. Bloodborne's numbers are good and make the way it's regarded for a port more reasonable compared to the earlier known number at around 2 million or so units. It seems that sales for this generations' software is generally abysmal relative to the market space, competition, and rapidly growing install base. Maybe the tails are decent at least.
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Without knowing the budgets for Death Stranding, $178 million are certainly a poor numbers for a triple A game.
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They didn't bother localized the game to Japanese, that's what.
Also Baseball is not a popular sport in Asia outside Japan.
How? Give me a realisitcs, representative example with math instead of some broad strokes “build a big base of users, like Netflix”
I use the AAA numbers because they are widely known.
Embracer has some pretty good disclosure as an an and AA studio. A pretty good return on investment is about 2X your total investment on a decent game. That’s development cost plus marketing. So if a game made only $50 million in sales, it typically had a total cost of $25 million.
So, again, if a smaller AA game sells 2 million units, with 25 hours of average gameplay that’s 50m hours of engagement. And at a $25 million development cost, that drops the cost per engagement hour to $0.50.
That’s still higher monetization than Xbox.
The developer was off by a good chunk, but Days Gone did get fairly close to the 8 million he assumed it sold by looking at trophy data at least. I think the numbers help explain why Bend has been hanging in there.
Edit: Further reading indicates that the game recouped its development costs and was in the stage of profitability at about 6 months after release at the latest- not because of explicit statement, but because of the date of the interview. Kojima also mentioned by that point that they'd secured enough profit to prepare what comes after, which seems substantial. It'd have been nice to get more granular sales data as well as more explicit statements from Kojima about recouping development when it happened as we'd have been able to estimate the development cost range that way. The source interview has interesting info about the development process as well.
Considering the speed of turn around inclusive of establishing the studio in that development period, the fact that the engine was already developed (Decima), the dev team being under 100 people, and the style of game with the use of motion capture/scanning, it seems doubtful that the development costs came close to a conventional release in the triple AAA bracket- this leaving aside Director's Cut and PC release contributions adding to the totals. To top it off, its brought in more than nearly half of PS's other first party PS4 titles in a portion of the time.
Edit: Further reading indicates that the game recouped its development costs and was in the stage of profitability at about 6 months after release at the latest- not because of explicit statement, but because of the date of the interview. Kojima also mentioned by that point that they'd secured enough profit to prepare what comes after, which seems substantial. It'd have been nice to get more granular sales data as well as more explicit statements from Kojima about recouping development when it happened as we'd have been able to estimate the development cost range that way. The source interview has interesting info about the development process as well.
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Here is probably the global bogey
$50bn in software video game revenue from consoles, per Newzoo
I think there is about 200m-250m console gamers.
Playing 25 per month, on average. So 60bn-70bn hours per year. That’s about $1.20-$1.40 in revenue per hour of game play.
I don’t see how Xbox isn’t revenue negative.
That doesn’t really matter in context to what I said. In terms of what was salvageable from JS, Team Asobi was the only viable development team. Sony doesn’t get another Bloodborne or Team Ico game regardless of who the producers were on it. The primary development teams are not part of SIE
This was my first thought (well directionally anyway) but I'd have to really play with the numbers to make something more presentable.
Gamepass is at 30 million subscribers from my quick google. Assuming $10/month per user in revenue and additional monetization that I assume they get from users having so many more titles available (that may also have monetization they wouldn't see if it was a unit sale) I would figure there is decent revenue to be made. Where I struggle to understand how the costs make sense is the cannabilization of retail sales and how that would play into generating 1st party content specifically. With third party content I'm going to assume they get more value out of titles hitting gamepass 1 year + later in terms of reccurent revenue than just selling a copy (since they only get 30%). But I dunno. Even this I struggle to see the third party appeal.
I dunno. I really would need to sit with the math for a while to make it make sense. This model makes a lot more sense to me if it isn't for new titles frankly.
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Feel like companies outside of Nintendo are still afraid to go whole hog on 2D even though there is a market for it, if contracted.
Worth noting that TLoU Remastered launched with an MSRP 10 dollars lower than the typical PS4 title. The price change came shortly before launch and they ended up issuing refunds for preorders. Additional factor affecting the numbers from the get-go.
AruanaRiva
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Atlus, Harada, Night game is the new Alliance!!!
Guess that is why many devs hated Nintendo lol. As they thought they are playing with cheat code kek.
BB is collaborative work between Fromsoft and Japan Studio. Cmon there. I know many love saying JP Studio did nothing but taking away their effort as well is just not the way to go.
The numbers don't support that though, Astrobomb isn't exactly a commercial wunderkund looking at these numbers and most other Japan Studio titles (both internal and external) likely outsold it.
Astrobot was only able to be played on a peripheral that sold about 5m., I don’t think the comparisons with the other games are apples to apples.
Honestly, until Team Asobi has a traditional release I find this to be a pointless comparison.
Lets be honest, you can call Japan Studios involvement whatever the fuck you want. If BB is the best they could do and that was in collaboration with From who have made tons of games in that style solo, that's not a complement to their necessity.
Then again, people have lots of opinions for this division who imo at least commercially, hadn't done fucking anything to justify their necessity. Granted I wouldn't have closed their doors but that's cause I think strategically me and Sony diverge. Not cause Japan Studios were adequate in their operation. Far from.
AruanaRiva
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Atlus, Harada, Night game is the new Alliance!!!
I mean.... i know people like Astrobot but c'mon guys. It certainly has not yet proven itself, it's sales potential there. It is being well received sure but Japan Studio has also been well received before just weak on the sales side.
Lets give Astrobot a proper release chance first without excuses of the game being stuck on low selling platform or just being tech demo there.
If it released on proper 60 bucks game on PS5 and it perform well then we can say the IP has bright future there.
Because Tearaway for example is said to suffer under Vita umbrella when it flop on Vita. Only to flop even worse when it hit PS4 there. So there is no guarantee there.
I don't give A F on Japan Studio being close down. Because Sony has closed it down and it has lead to many newer studio that provide same experience of IP that Sony has left behind.
I just don't like the act of saying that Japan Studio is just failure company when they certainly has been more successful than whatever Media Molecule has done for years and yet they are still running. We call many of Japan Studio previous release as flop when Japan Studio is one of the reason why Vita keep chugging in Japan. Their release of Soul Sacrifice, Freedom Wars all helped Vita stabilize in Japan when Sony entire dev team abandon the machine and even tried to kill Vita by making its exclusive into PS4 cross platform title.
Japan Studio simply unable to cope with the focus Sony going for which is A Okay. But to diminish everything they have done is just shitty take.
I had to look up the difference between net sales and net income since I mix them up sometimes. Basically it is this:
Net sales = gross sales - (returns + allowances + discounts)
Net income = (net sales + other income sources) - all expenses
So the Net Sales figure is not telling us the full picture in terms of profit, but gives us a clear picture for revenue.
Anyways, the data here is pretty valuable, but it is a shame it was obtained in a nefarious manner. I want to know though if the sell-through figure includes free downloads from PSN because I received Uncharted 4 and Bloodborne from PS+ as part of the monthly "free" games. I wonder if they would track that as a "purchase" because I downloaded.
Net sales = gross sales - (returns + allowances + discounts)
Net income = (net sales + other income sources) - all expenses
So the Net Sales figure is not telling us the full picture in terms of profit, but gives us a clear picture for revenue.
Anyways, the data here is pretty valuable, but it is a shame it was obtained in a nefarious manner. I want to know though if the sell-through figure includes free downloads from PSN because I received Uncharted 4 and Bloodborne from PS+ as part of the monthly "free" games. I wonder if they would track that as a "purchase" because I downloaded.
Break-even:
- Major production under license "Spider-Man" - 5M
- Large production "TLOU II" 4M
- Intermediate production "Death Stranding" - 2.5M
- Small production "Ratchet & Clank Rift Appart/Returnal" - 500k-1.5M
On the condition of course of making sales with a price of $40-70.
The problem with Days Gone is that it achieved sales mostly at low prices and late.
For Sony, having a Metacritic of ~70 and a timid start do not allow them to launch a sequel.
Death Stranding has several advantages over Days Gone:
- Japanese game
-Kojima
- Correct start (thanks to the fanbase who are always ready even to buy Kojima's bath water)
- A better metacritic
- Unique universe
- Major production under license "Spider-Man" - 5M
- Large production "TLOU II" 4M
- Intermediate production "Death Stranding" - 2.5M
- Small production "Ratchet & Clank Rift Appart/Returnal" - 500k-1.5M
On the condition of course of making sales with a price of $40-70.
The problem with Days Gone is that it achieved sales mostly at low prices and late.
For Sony, having a Metacritic of ~70 and a timid start do not allow them to launch a sequel.
Death Stranding has several advantages over Days Gone:
- Japanese game
-Kojima
- Correct start (thanks to the fanbase who are always ready even to buy Kojima's bath water)
- A better metacritic
- Unique universe
I mean, Media Molecule just got hit with layoffs so it isn't like they are just being left to do whatever the fuck they want. Since LBP2 they haven't made anything successful. But LBP1 and LBP2 sold super well.
True spit, we can reasonably forgive Japan Studios for having nothing commercially successful on the Vita given the Vita was the Vita. But what about the rest of its existance from the PS3 til when it got shuttered?
No one is dimishing their work in terms of saying they made good games that were enjoyed by people. But it's a sales forum that is suppose to have a somewhat objective view of business and I struggle so immensely to understand why people give a fuck about this studio from a commercial standpoint.
I'd argue that they should have stuck around from a strategy standpoint (with huge ass changes though) but they more or less did nothing notable in all honesty. Someone saying Team Asobi outperforming Japan Studios on a VR machine justifies their retention is just a fallacy. If all you have to do to avoid purgatory is make a game that sells 1 million units in an isolated situation one time, that's some weak ass criteria. But using Bloodborne as a counter is also a non starter of a conversation that deserves 0 acknowledgement.
This seems to have answered my question. I guess they have a separate tally for "players" so it appears that the sell-through numbers are actually legit sell-through.
Uncharted 4 was players because they added the game to PS service
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End Has Been Played By Over 37 Million People
A taste for adventurewww.pushsquare.com
The 33 million figure was for Spider-Man 1/Remastered/MM right before the release of the PC Ports : https://blog.playstation.com/2022/06/02/marvels-spider-man-series-is-coming-to-pc/
God Of War was 23M as of March 2022~ from the FY end report when they wanted to boast about how many copies the PC version of the game which launched in Jan 2022 boosted the game's total sales.
So yeah, none of those are 30+ million sellers. Plus there's all the sales figures for older games which never got updated or smaller games which we never got any numbers.
AruanaRiva
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Atlus, Harada, Night game is the new Alliance!!!
I dont think calling Rachet and clank which cost 81m to make is..... Small production there.
In Sony studio, they simply don't have small production anymore. All is simply AAA. Just how far bigger the AAA is at this point.
Well, I can't give a representative example because the info for gamepass is unknow. Phil Spencer says is profitable, but of course we can't get that as gospel.
For me doesn't sound implausible a service like that with tens of millions subscribers to be economically functional, but if gamepass is already there or Microsoft remains losing money to grow I don't know.