At this point, Sony may be widely known for its ambitious single-player PlayStation games from franchises you’ve come to know and love – series like God of war, HorizonAnd Spider-Man occur to me. But in a few years you might be playing a lot of new PlayStation franchises – and a lot of live service titles.
As part of a company presentation on Tuesday, Sony shared some updates on how it plans to invest in its portfolio. In fiscal year 2025, for example, it estimates that 50 percent of its PlayStation Studios investment will be in new IP, which is a big jump from years past: According to a slide, in fiscal year 2019, only 20 percent of its investments were in new franchises. And if you look at the slide, that 50 percent of investment in FY23 appears to be the same — if not greater — than total spending in FY19.
The changes could be even more notable for the way Sony invests in what it calls “traditional” games and live-service games. In FY19 the split was 88 percent traditional games and 12 percent live service games, but in FY25 Sony expects that ratio to flip to 40/60. (During the presentation, PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst said Sony currently has 12 live service games in production – a number that Sony has shared in the past.)
If you’ve been following PlayStation’s movements over the past few years, these shifts shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Sony has made some big acquisitions in studios working on major live-service titles, including Bungie, Jade Raymond’s Haven Studios, and Firewalk Studios, and Horizon franchise developer Guerrilla Games has already announced that it is working on a multiplayer Horizon game. Sony has clearly seen how studios like Epic Games (in which it has invested hundreds of millions) and Bungie (which it now owns) can encourage players to invest huge amounts of time and money into it Fortnite And Lot 2-level hits, and it looks like Sony sees a significant opportunity in making their own live-service games.
It seems likely that we’ll be getting a look at some of those new franchises or live-service games on Wednesday at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase, especially since the company has already promised that the event will “give a glimpse of several new creations from PlayStation Studios.”
