Ekaterina Bespyatova

Sony will transfer its games to mobile and will be more active in making PC ports – the main thing from the presentation for investors

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Yesterday Sony held a presentation for investors, where it shared the main figures of the gaming direction and plans for the future. It turned out that PlayStation is going to “go beyond consoles” and focus, among other things, on ports for mobile and PC.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End
We have selected the main thing from the company’s report:

  • In 2020, PlayStation was more profitable than ever before — the operating profit of the gaming direction amounted to ¥342 billion ($3.2 billion);

  • The PS5‘s starting sales are higher than other Sony consoles. During the fiscal year, the company sold 7.8 million consoles of the new generation. This is 200 thousand more than the PS4, and 1.2 million more than the PS3 for the same period at the start of sales. And by the end of next year, it expects to deliver over 14.8 million PS5 units;
  • Sony plans to capture at least 50% of the console market with the PS5. For comparison, with the PS4, it controlled 45% of the market;

  • Last year, over 10% of Sony’s gaming revenue was generated by developing countries;
  • now the standard version of the PS5 consoles (with a drive) is sold at a loss, but the company expects to reach payback next month;
  • PS5 receives the lion’s share of revenue (80%) not from the sale of consoles themselves, but from the sale of software, subscriptions to services and peripherals;

  • A quarter of PS Store revenue comes from free-play games;
  • Over the past year, 6.1 million new users signed up for PS Plus. As a result, the number of subscribers of the service reached 47.6 million people;
  • the audience of PS Now was 3.2 million people at the end of 2020 — almost twice as many as in 2019;

According to analyst Mat Piscatella, the explosive growth of this (and not only) service shows the huge interest of gamers in cloud games. According to the analyst, such a trend is able to determine the course by which the industry will develop in the next decade.

  • Regular M&A deals and sales of exclusive content will remain important growth factors for Sony;
  • the company is also going to bring more games to the PC, based on the successful experience of the PC release of Horizon Zero Dawn. The ROI of the game exceeded 250%, and it helped to strengthen in the markets of China, Russia and India. Now Sony Wants to Port Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End;

As noted by Tom Warren, editor-in-chief of The Verge, Sony’s decision to move its franchises to PC looks strange. On the one hand, PC versions of games really bring a lot of income. But on the other hand, Sony previously “canceled” the ports of Demon’s Souls and Final Fantasy XVI.

Analyst Daniel Ahmad noted that bringing franchises to the mobile market and finding a fresh audience there is already standard practice. For example, recently Xbox and Chinese TiMi Studios announced a collaboration, which hints at the upcoming creation of mobile content.

In addition, mobile’s revenue is more than twice the revenue from consoles.

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