Sony Won’t Release Any New Major Existing Franchise Titles before April 2025

[Moonface]

Sony Interactive Entertainment has stated there are no plans for "any new major existing franchise titles" before March 31, 2025 during their fiscal year 2023 Q3 earnings briefing.

Regarding first-party software, we aim to continue to focus on producing high-quality works and developing live service games. But while major projects are currently under development, we do not plan to release any new major existing franchise titles next fiscal year (April 1, 2024 - March 31, 2025) like God of War Ragnarök and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Although the burden of acquisition related costs will ease next fiscal year, we expect profit from first-party software to decrease slightly from this fiscal year due to the impact of the decrease in sales. Due to this, operating income for the next fiscal year is currently expected to increase slightly from this fiscal year. However, while this our baseline, we are reviewing measures for further improvement in profitability in advance of the annual forecast results announcement this May.

For clarification, anything that is a new IP does not fall under this plan nor any IP that are not viewed by SIE as major franchises. Hiroki Totoki also commented on the future outlook of sales for the PlayStation 5, as well as his experience in the role of chairman since taking the position in October 2023, which can be read in the same article that reported this story: https://www.gematsu.com/2024/02/sony-int...ch-31-2025

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I'm not really surprised about this. I can't even think of a major IP Sony has under their belt that hasn't had a recent entry.

[ShiraNoMai]

I'd be curious to know if they intend to at least show something so investors can like, I don't know, put some modicum of hope in this company while it ekes its way out of a bad time

[Moonface]

I'd be curious to know if they intend to at least show something so investors can like, I don't know, put some modicum of hope in this company while it ekes its way out of a bad time

Before changing course on it I'd suspect Sony were showing some of the live service game stuff that was being worked on, especially because those games are the golden goose publishers have been chasing after.

[ShiraNoMai]

Yeah, that's absolutely true. Those games just straight up looked like they came out of a board room meeting tbh

[Moonface]

Yeah, that's absolutely true. Those games just straight up looked like they came out of a board room meeting tbh

If this is referring to how Concord looks, that's probably one of the very few if not only GaaS games Sony had cooking that's a new IP. Most others that were heard about either officially or heavily rumored were based on existing IP with TLoU, Horizon and Spider-Man being three in particular that were getting some form of multiplayer GaaS style entry. I expect the only reason Concord made it further than those is that the developers behind it have experience working on Destiny so aren't trying to make a GaaS game with zero experience in how to actually do it. 

I wonder if any of those investors felt a loss in confidence if they had actually seen any of the other GaaS games Sony were working on that got cancelled or in the case of TLoU Factions, outright ripped to shreds by Bungie before being ultimately cancelled. Then when Sony did finally get one that was a big hit (Helldivers 2) they shot it in the back of the head with stupid decision making. Sony's single player games are always usually strong so confidence can remain in those, but I wonder if that's dependent now on how much focus was being given to those before Sony changed course on live service titles. Considering all but Insomniac have released one or zero games this generation I can't imagine it's easy to put confidence in things that aren't coming along as often as they used to nor generate a constant revenue stream. 

Dang, reading that paragraph again actually makes the state of game development sound really shit if it's being viewed anything like that by the pen pushers...