If Returnal has been a big hit since its release a year ago, Housemarque’s games are still an exception in the PS5 catalog for now, consisting mostly of established licenses. These include Demon’s Souls, Ratchet & Clank: Rift, Horizon Forbidden, Motorsport Tycoon 7, and the upcoming Ragnarok. New licenses accounted for only 23% of PlayStation Studios’ production investment in 2018-2019, but the goal is to make them progress each year. For the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Sony even intends to break even by pouring 50% of its investment into its new licenses.
In another impressive shift, Sony estimates that 55% of its investment in 2024-2025 will be in game-as-a-service production. Between its in-house teams and partner studios, the maker expects to have a dozen sustainable games out by March 2026. All market research points in the same direction: Player spending is increasingly in the form of in-game transactions (especially free-to-play games like Fortnite, Genshin Impact, Call of Duty Warzone, Apex Legends and Rocket League) and Sony no longer intends to Continue to be a bystander to this phenomenon.
Sony’s ability to be successful with multi-platform deployments will be one of the keys to achieving its goals. According to its target, the PlayStation in 2025 will only be able to achieve 53% of sales on the PS5, while PC (28%) and mobile (19%) will have a larger share, but Sony still has everything to do in this area thing. Even Nintendo couldn’t tame it.