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PlayStation is shifting its business model to something that aligns more closely with its live-service ambitions, its new CFO Lin Tao says.
Push Square reports that in Sony's recent earnings call, Tao says: "Sell-in units was the focus but now we are focused on monthly active users [MAU]. The management is focused on engagement and MAU. This is leading to profitability."
Last quarter, PlayStation had a peak of 124 million monthly active users, which means a lot of potential spending. Around half of those users are on PS4.
It may seem strange for a company with such a strong foundation in single-player first-party games to be prioritizing engagement over actual game sales, but a lot of companies are making huge amounts of money thanks to microtransactions purchased in free-to-play games.
Whenever someone buys a skin in Fortnite or Call of Duty, the platform the game is being played on gets a cut of the sale. Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation all take 30% of every purchase, so as long as people are playing live-service games on their platforms, these companies are making money without even having to release expensive new games.
Tao also says: "In the past, there were issues with the first-party studios, and Totoki-san was temporarily the CEO and talked about various structural reform. Compared to a few years ago, the financial discipline is in place, but there's still upside opportunity here. Mainly, I think the mindset has changed significantly."
So, it seems Sony is determined to keep PlayStation development spending under control while putting more focus on microtransactions in live-service games, which explains why it's so keen to make more itself.
Concord was pulled from shelves just two weeks after launching, which has cast more doubt than ever over Sony's ability to give a big live-service game a successful launch. There's already some controversy around the publisher's biggest live-service release this year, as Bungie has admitted Marathon used another artist's work without crediting them.
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