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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.
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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.
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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.
I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.
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