Sony Interactive Entertainment/PlayStation President & CEO Jim Ryan On Gamepass: "I can say with a very high degree of certainty that Microsoft has tried the first path and it did not work at all. That has driven them to make the large acquisition. I talked to all the publishers, and they unanimously do not like Game Pass because it is value destructive, not only on an individual title-basis, but also or an industry level. The recent number of subscribers that Microsoft announced on January was 25 Million. I am sure everyone has their own views on this, but I personally was expecting a larger number given all the money they have spent. We have close to 50 Million PlayStation Plus subscribers. We believe we have a meaningful subscription service."
More into it
"We will do what we are doing right now, which is to become less reliant on 3rd Party games and 3rd Party royalties, and to make more 1st Party games. If we double our share of 1st Party games, which are more profitable than the 3rd Party royalty stream, it will bring down our reliance on 3rd Party games." "That is the single biggest thing, and one of the main reasons why we are embarking on M&A. I would like to point out that we are also growing our existing studios, increasing capabilities and their ability to output in various areas including live services. I feel like this part deserves a lot more attention than it currently gets. Large M&A gets all the headlines, but there is a lot going on, and growing your studios organically successfully is a smart thing to do."
"It would be naive for us to assume that all 10 will be massive successes so that is not a necessary condition for us to double first party revenues. That is certainly not what we're assuming. Clearly, the distinction between a hit and not a hit is not a binary one. And don't forget that as we do this, we will continue to publish the games that have served us so well over the years. These 3rd person, graphically beautiful narrative rich games will continue to be the bedrock of our first party publishing business.""We will continue to make 3rd person games like we always have, and we expect those to have slightly greater sales and profitability, reflecting our confidence in the long-term installed base of PS5, as well as the fact that those games will make their way to PC. So, we think that the pie from those games will grow, but that growth will be incremental in nature. We think the live service games will build on that foundation and take us to another level."
"We know Activision extremely well. They are probably one of our principal partners. In terms of deployment of Sony's capital, when you look at $69 Billion dollars for Activision compared to $3.6 Billion dollars for Bungie, we believe that Bungie can give us way more than a $69 Billion acquisition of Activision. And that's before considering the relative value of that particular transaction."
"We're approaching metaverse conversations through 2 lenses. First is as a platform holder. We had something called PlayStation Home for the PS3 and that was a very early manifestation of a platform metaverse. It was probably 10-15 years ahead of its time.""The second is from the studio perspective. We have a couple of projects underway that are very exciting for us, in terms of creating some sort of game-type metaverse which can possibly have collaboration with other parts of Sony. Sony's entertainment assets have huge potential in the metaverse area. As for VR2, we see it as having a role down the road, more in the mid-term."
. I believe they should have had first party come to gamepass after 3 to 6 months.
