Sony has a problem where they look at the most successful games in the industry and think everything is like that. So they look at Fortnite and GTA online and Genshin impact and think "Oh, live service games always make billions of dollars". Then they spent 10 billion dollars making 10 live service flops in a row.
With this, they're looking at GTA VI clearing 50M copies sold on digital pre-orders alone and they think that people will tolerate that from any game now. They're going to learn the hard way that sony studios do not make GTA-tier games.
Even if 90% of sales are digital, do the shareholders not want 10% more money? They had this same brain problem with Hell Divers 2, their one live service success. They tried to force PSN accounts to goose their internal metrics and for legal reasons that would cut off everyone who isn't in the the Anglosphere or EU, which again is 'only' 10-15% of players - but in the case of HD2 that means you're throwing away > $100M.
Sony has a problem where they look at the most successful games in the industry and think everything is like that. So they look at Fortnite and GTA online and Genshin impact and think "Oh, live service games always make billions of dollars". Then they spent 10 billion dollars making 10 live service flops in a row.
With this, they're looking at GTA VI clearing 50M copies sold on digital pre-orders alone and they think that people will tolerate that from any game now. They're going to learn the hard way that sony studios do not make GTA-tier games.
Even if 90% of sales are digital, do the shareholders not want 10% more money? They had this same brain problem with Hell Divers 2, their one live service success. They tried to force PSN accounts to goose their internal metrics and for legal reasons that would cut off everyone who isn't in the the Anglosphere or EU, which again is 'only' 10-15% of players - but in the case of HD2 that means you're throwing away > $100M.