• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Sony’s death-grip on their platform is more profitable than selling the game. They only fund games to promote the Playstation brand. There is nothing else propping up the Playstation brand. Without lock-in they only make a decent gaming PC with a weird OS.

      I sincerely think they’re rattled by Microsoft turning Xbox into a gradient… or whatever the fuck Microsoft is doing. Xbox exists specifically to PC-ify the console market, and they’ve succeeded so completely that the console market is now two AMD laptops versus an Android tablet.

      Sony saw how much money they were making just being a PC publisher and it scared the shit out of them. They desperately do not want to be just a PC publisher. This debacle has been a direct overreaction to that possibility.

      So on the plus side, Sony’s not extracting value from your name and phone number. They want it to be 2004 again. They want every game to be for one platform, so no matter how good or bad their machine’s games are, they can sell the machine as having their games. But that model nearly sunk the PS3, as multiplatform development triumphed, and now Microsoft has tricked them into releasing PC ports. MS isn’t talking about Halo on PS5 because they need the sales, you know? Sony wants to keep winning the console war… but Sony needs there to be a console war.

    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      more profitable in the short term

      there’s no way you can build a 10- or 20-year business plan around that.

        • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          They sold the original Playstation at a loss, the PSP was a bit of a flop and was advertised with a white woman physically intimidating a black woman by holding her by the face, they tried to copyright the words “Let’s Play”, and their laptop batteries used to explode causing the biggest recall of pcs in history.

          There’s plenty of examples of them fucking up.

          • PotatoKat@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Selling consoles for a loss at release is a common practice. They make most of their money from software sales and around the time of the mid gen refresh the consoles start selling for a profit. Also the PSP sold really well and was hardly a flop (the vita on the other hand)

        • srecko@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          Lance Armstrong won 7 tour the France, he must have been doing something right.

    • Xanis@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      It won’t happen, though part of me just wishes ol’ Gaben would up and find a loophole in the Sony contract and tell the Helldiver 2 devs to directly partner with Steam. Not because I think it’s a legitimately good idea; because the pure chaos this would cause would be extraordinary.