Sony is investing $2.1B in gaming R&D, focusing on live service.
insider-gaming.com
In a report published by Nikkei, it was revealed that Sony intends to ‘pour’ financial resources into gaming research and development – to the tune of around $2.13 billion. That’s reportedly an investment that’s being made before the end of fiscal year 2024, and it’ll account for a whopping 40% of Sony’s entire R&D spending.
Sony plans to allocate a staggering 60% of all PlayStation 5 development spending to live service games exclusively for the year ending March 2026. It was also stated that there’s a grand goal in place to have no fewer than twelve live service games in the PlayStation portfolio within that same timeline.
Exciting times for everyone in Live Ops I'm sure 😉
:D
>:(
Fuck live services. Just another subscription model.
And worse, they're nearly universally designed with always-online killswitches that destroy preservation for those games.
Yes!
No!
More like investment in FOMO game design.
Did they forget they built their current audience on strong single player titles? Seems like this is a sahreholder appeasing move, as in if he didn't ok this they would replace Ryan.
They're a public company. their shareholders are the customers they have to please. Not you.
Exactly lol
12 live service games by 2026, and 9 of them will have flopped, been sunset, and lost forever to time by 2028.
Sony has owned Gaikai since 2012 and Onlive('s patents) since 2015, and it was feature-complete last decade. What is billions more going to do?
Live service means ongoing support, content, and subscription's, not remote cloud gaming.
None of those require R&D.
R&D in this case would be prototyping, testing network infrastructure, etc. Seeing what type of live service game they think the market will react well to.
That's not R&D though, that's market research and system/network engineering/architecture. R&D is specifically for blue-sky inventing, not so much iterating.
It's market research and game development. I don't think Sony has existing live service games to iterate on, so they're making something new. A lot of new somethings.
Booo
Yay r&d into the worst type of game model…. Can’t wait to see all the failures that get abandoned within 6 months of launch