Sony knows the future of interactive entertainment is turning games into hobbies. In the near future, most gamers will likely only be playing 2-3 games (if that) and they will be coming back to each game on a regular basis as new content is released. Destiny, Gran Turismo, League of Legends, Warzone, Fortnite, Rainbow Six Siege, ALL of these games are hobbies for the people that play them. Earlier this year, Sony confirmed that they have 12 of these games in development. Why such a large number? The executives at Sony know that their audience isn’t going to keep playing all 12. There’s a very good chance that more than half of those games will fail, build a very tiny audience and will get minimal support for years. That’s fine. All Sony REALLY needs is one game like Fortnite. Or Warzone. Or Destiny. One game, carried out over 5-10 years, will pay for every single game that Sony develops in the interim. Sony is making 12 games because they know the more they make, the more chances they have at striking gold.
Let’s be clear about this, because it bears repeating. No executive at Sony expects all twelve of those games to be successes. Sony is entering the live-service market late, and there are simply too many dominant players taking up mindshare in the space. The average Playstation user already has their favorite game that they have poured months or years of their free-time into. Sony’s challenge will be to not only make amazing live service games, but actually pull those players away from their favorite games to try a new one. Perhaps what Sony may not realize is that although free games will often get downloaded, it's a much bigger task to actually get a player to invest in the universe. That investment by the player involves learning the game's controls, economy, gameplay structure, social functions and seasonal structure. Because live service games are systems built upon systems (battle pass, crafting, grinding, etc), The intellectual investment from the player is considerable. Players know this and it makes free games intimidating. There’s a reason that a large group of hardcore gamers don’t play mobile games; one of those reasons is them knowing the significance of the investment and the payoff of enjoyment. The payoff would be worth discussing later. For now, we can focus on the time investment.
As a hardcore gamer myself, I find investing in most AAA games that I purchase to be very doable, while trying out a live service experience fills me with suspicion and dread. I go in knowing I’ll need to memorize a complicated economy, deal with advertisements and “sales” and spend a dozen hours figuring out if I’m actually having fun or just satisfying my lizard brain. Even if I decide that I am having fun, I’m then going to do the research to see if the game actually has a healthy player-base and has a chance of surviving the next few years. If I think it doesn’t, I’ll drop it like a parking-lot tv purchase. Even someone like me, who is passionate about the games industry and the different models of payment and financing games have, 6 games in a year is a big ask. Especially from only a single company.
I don’t blame Sony for wanting to do it. I don’t even think it's a bad idea. But twelve is simply too many. The reason is that their fanbase is eventually going to stop listening and stop trying new products altogether. You can’t just launch an infinite number of games and expect the consumer to pay equal attention to all of them. There is such a thing as attention fatigue, and by releasing that many new free games over the course of a two or three year period, the average Playstation user is going to get sick of hearing about new “free” games and they’re just going to stick with what they know.
There is also the perception of quality to consider. If Sony has released its 4th live service game, but the last three have been trash, why should I think this new one is going to be any different? Over the course of a year you might get a customer to try one or two brand new games. There’s no way you’d ever convince them to try all six, and that's especially true if there are six more the next year. Even if these games were released at a cadence of once per quarter, that still only gives the consumer three months to try the game before the “new hotness” is out. For many live service games, that's barely a single season of content. With that kind of timeline, the player barely has a chance for the game to actually become a proper hobby. I suppose a great way to space these titles out then is to alternate their releases by platform. For example, Release a Playstation game in January and then release a mobile game in March.
One of those live service games, I anticipate, is the new Wipeout game. I’ve spent some time watching gameplay videos and reading some preview material for it. This game is going to flop so hard. I doubt it will make gaming headlines. It looks like common, generic, mobile trash, and I say that as a fan of mobile and idle games. What little press has covered the game is unimpressed with the offering, and I fear the game is destined for the bottom half of the 20 million other games on the App Store. This is an important point, however. Not all 12 of those games have to be console releases; in fact it's better if they aren’t.
Sony is getting into the live service game for the same reason that everyone else is. They want the money. They may not necessarily want a live service game taking wallet share away from their AAA single-player exclusives like God of War or Horizon. They are already getting that money and they want to continue to get it. In contrast, they’re making almost nothing from the mobile space. Finding a revenue stream from the App Store wouldn’t threaten Sony’s current model at all, and it wouldn’t threaten their fan base either. In fact, it likely wouldn’t even upset their fanbase.
Mobile offerings in the gaming space are ignored by the hardcore gaming public. Final Fantasy has been bastardized to hell and back on mobile, but fans don’t seem to care. No one seems to complain about the GTA ports, Dead Cells or other mobile adapted indies. Diablo got crucified, but I suspect that’s mostly because fans haven’t gotten a new diablo game in nearly a decade. Once Diablo 4 comes out, Immortal will be sidelined by gamers and it will continue to have its mobile-centric fanbase.
Last of Us Factions will of course come out on Playstation 5, and perhaps one or two others. The rest will be mobile adaptations of popular Sony franchises. That keeps hardcore fans from being overwhelmed, and keeps the drama away from the console space. On the other side, it opens revenue streams for Sony on mobile, advertising their franchises to the general public and getting them familiar with franchises that are going to turn into movies.
The best strategy for Sony, then, is to keep most of their live service ideas off of their consoles, and instead seed those ideas in the mobile space. That way, they let their juggernaut exclusive franchises have their spotlight, allowing them to continue charging full prices for premium content. This will make third parties happy too, as they feel they won’t have to compete with the giant budgets of Sony’s AAA first-party games.
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