Osiris397

The current strategies are still to be revealed since the change of leadership, but global territory expansion seems like something that's always been in Playstation's plans considering the China Hero Project, India Hero Project initiatives, it's just a question of how fast or slow. The MENA Hero Project (Middle East and North Africa) is part of that. It seems' like these Hero Projects are a way to fund smaller development, but also a way to get Playstation reps on the ground in these places to get larger groups of developers/games when they exist from the same region like for the games Black Myth Wukong and Phantom Blade Zero.

I'm not so sure I would lump NMS in here only because I suspect people that are hesitant about the title are people that generally wouldn't like a game that's primary game loop is exploration and resource mining/farming. The odd thing about NMS is I feel like every major update has been a mini relaunch of the games for new players and it's VR edition is pretty groundbreaking in VR gaming.

I found these news stories a couple of weeks ago and they confirmed some things I thought. NWN blogs: Quest 2 VR Usage/sales rates: This article basically states that most people that bought Quest 2s didn't buy many games and didn't engage with VR content online much: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/01/quest-2-vr-usage-sales-rates.html RoadtoVR: Quest Sales, 20 million, Retention Struggles This article essentially has Facebook officials confirm the struggles and promise efforts to do better: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-struggles/ UploadVR: Quest 3 appears to have sold at least 1 million units After a year and maybe a half the Quest 3 sales: https://www.uploadvr.com/quest-3-sold-at-least-1-million-units/ Ok, so the Quest 2 sold roughly 5 Million units per year, but now that part of the user base is effectively dead. In the last 8+ years there has been a linear decline Meta investment into the VR space (advertising particularly) even while they are spending billions per quarter still to support it, so it seems more like a billionaire's vanity project than a real business, as such support could be completely yanked from it at any time. On top of that a lot of the years of holiday advertisement blitzing was somewhat, to be kind, misleading. It's possible the company burned up whatever goodwill with customers that they had. Games media generally refuses to highlight any of these facts even though they are critically important for a lot of people considering purchasing a Quest. From a PCVR/Quest Youtube Influencer walking away from making Quest content for these reasons: Ultimately, I don't think VR is cooked and PSVR2 strikes the right balance in a lot of areas for a lot of different reasons.

It definitely seems like they're taking a much, much more conservative approach to GAAS. Honestly they have had non-GAAS success with multiplayer games like Uncharted, TLOU Factions and Ghost of Tsushima Legends. Many players would pay once for DLC level expansions, but the constant MT along side a completely useless in-game XP system (the standard) just instantly drives most gamers nuts and then drives them away.

If rumors are to be believed Playstation has squandered over a BILLION DOLLARS on games the Playstation gaming community would have essentially viewed radioactive if released at any point in the last 7-8 years, but there's a lot more to this and the long history of failure with GAAS. There is no successful live services sector of gaming there’s a handful of successful games (and that’s being generous.) It’s been the case that the few successful service games are outnumbered by the unsuccessful ones by exponential factors since well before Sony sent itself careening into failure with it’s ill-advised live service agenda, hence the need for all their public defending of live-service…the cloak and dagger organizational “streamlining” and railroading of certain executives that most certainly would not have gone along with it. Consider a single minuscule VR case of a failed live service PSVR game almost fully funded by PlayStation, Megalith. The game looked good, it was polished butch had few levels, playable characters and enemies. Initially it attracted players, however before the end of it as I recall the rancor the few fans had for the openly greedy publishers/devs in their discord left every one bitter and eroded the user base to zero in like under a week from what I could tell. That was 5-6 years ago and a drop in the bucket. Disruptive games went on to build Godfall and relatively recently announce significant layoffs. One larger industry long term problem with these GAAS games as a a games initiative, not only is that once the franchise is built exclusively as a GAAS product that runs it’s course the publisher typically kills it and the game vanishes like it never existed, but also it will NEVER be able to come back, like Overwatch. Blizzard learned the hard way with Overwatch 2. Beyond that industry wide irreparable and ultimately fatal reputational harm to ANY FRANCHISE THAT REMOTELY LOOKS OR PLAYS LIKE IT is also doomed because of the player perception of GAAS as predatory. Sony’s wasted $300M-$400M on Concord plus other recently canceled GAAS attest to that. Consider that the Overwatch Beta, a product that wasn’t yet made available to the public won GOTY in 2016…9 years ago. Uncharted 4 was also a nominee. Overwatch is a worthless franchise and Activision will never be able rejuvenate, they will never be able to build spin-offs from it, Overwatch will never be a trans media product. All of these things that will never happen with Overwatch will and are happening with Uncharted and it will continue to generate hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in revenue for Sony going far into the future. This franchise erosion aspect of GAAS is a problem for which there will likely be many business case studies made in the future around the question of whether the short term success of the one in a million GAAS game success is worth any investment to any party involved.