Sony Investing $2.1B In Gaming R&D, Focusing on Live Service - Insider Gaming
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Sony has expressed an intention to flesh out its PlayStation portfolio with live service games and has invested $2.1B to see it done.

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 😉

  • Jacoolh
    27•10 months ago

    Fuck live services. Just another subscription model.

    • ampersandrew
      6•10 months ago

      And worse, they’re nearly universally designed with always-online killswitches that destroy preservation for those games.

    • Jinxyface
      2•10 months ago

      They’re a public company. their shareholders are the customers they have to please. Not you.

  • ampersandrew
    7•10 months ago

    12 live service games by 2026, and 9 of them will have flopped, been sunset, and lost forever to time by 2028.

  • @SheeEttin@lemmy.world
    4•10 months ago

    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?

    • DMmeYourNudes
      4•10 months ago

      Live service means ongoing support, content, and subscription’s, not remote cloud gaming.

        • ampersandrew
          2•10 months ago

          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.

          • @SheeEttin@lemmy.world
            0•10 months ago

            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.

            • ampersandrew
              1•10 months ago

              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.

  • JJROKCZ
    1•10 months ago

    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