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Many people on the various posts about the Sony leaks have been wondering what exactly all this means and why Sony is having issues. This post is designed to break some of the scattered info down to create an idea of where Sony is headed.
To understand anything about modern Sony, one needs to understand 3 key things:
The PlayStation 5 was released a little over 3 years ago, in that time 12 exclusives have been released.
The Game & Network Services (gaming) division is Sony's largest division, making about 26 billion USD of the 88 billion they made across the whole company in FY2022. It is also the primary driver of the company's growth. The Music division and the Imaging and Sensing division are also growing, but not nearly as quickly. The Electronics Products & Solutions division is a good source of revenue, but it's basically stagnant.
In April 2016 (April 1st lol), Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (SIE) was created to operate PlayStation (and pretty much the entire gaming division). This ended up effectively moving the HQ of the PlayStation part of the company from Japan (the HQ of SIE's two predecessors) to San Mateo, California, the HQ of the newly formed SIE.
Sony's PlayStation brand has always been a very strong performer in the gaming market, ever since the PS1. It has had it's ups and downs, but has always been a good source of revenue and growth that's been able to capitalize on the continuously growing video game industry. This is best shown with the fact that PS5 has sold way more units than the Xbox series X and S, about twice as many.
However Sony is actually 2nd in a 3 player race, Nintendo is absolutely crushing both Sony and Microsoft in terms of console units sold. The Switch has sold 3x more than the PS5 despite only being twice as old. In fact in 2023 the Switch has been estimated to have sold an extra 10 million units over the PS5, so the Switch's advantage is not all because of it's age.
The main reason is that many Japanese developers and customers started to switch to the Switch, this will be explained later.
No big deal, right? Sony can at least keep a lock on the American AAA market and claw back over the next few years, right? Well, that was probably the plan, until Microsoft did the unexpected: they changed the entire industry.
Microsoft has always treated Xbox as a side business, never really getting the full backing of the entire company. This is because Microsoft is 24x larger than Sony in terms of market cap. Even if Xbox had an overwhelmingly dominant position in the current console business, it wouldn't really be a huge deal.
Thus, Sony always remained safe knowing that they were too small and insignificant to be crushed by Microsoft, and that they also had a very strong Japanese following (of both customers and developers) that would never go team Xbox. That is of course until two different developments occurred:
Microsoft decided that the console business isn't important... but the entire gaming industry is. They determined that if they could get a large slice of the entire gaming pie, not just console money, they would be able to make tons of money.
The Japanese turned on Sony, and started to move to Nintendo.
Both of these developments are best explained separately, so I'll be making 2 different posts that will cover each side of this 2 pronged assault on Sony's lunch.
Which should I write about first:
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Can someone explain why the PS5 STILL has no games
lol
If I was a PS5 owner I'd be
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They always do the same every gen: completely ignore the first 3/4 of a console's gen, start pumping out great games in the last 1/4.
People have short memory and rush to buy the next gen console then
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Just an issue with gaming as a whole. Even Nintendo seems to be struggling with it compared to their output historically.
The current gen consoles rely on backwards compatibility. Even for the 360/PS3 the industry couldn't make games fast enough for there to be a decent library at launch.
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HD game development is incredibly time consuming and requires an insane amount of resources
Back in like PS1 days you could have a midsize team crank out a decent quality game within 6-12 months or so. Now you need teams of hundreds dedicated to a specific task (rendering/engine/etc) taking a minimum of 3-4 years if everything goes well (it never does). Reusing middleware can cut into the time needed but not by much. Like
@Rule4Follower said this really has been a problem since the first HD consoles came out.
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Ironically I disagree with you completely. I think the reason for this is that the industry chose to abandon the midsized team making annual or biannual releases in favor of always trying to make the biggest game ever with the biggest budget and best graphics. Not every game needs to be that.
I think software development is limited by bottlenecks rather than the amount of code your team can type, so I think most of the time having 500 people isn't any better than having 50, and actually the job of managing those people becomes a large enough undertaking that it slows everything down and distracts the most experienced and talented devs.
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You are missing
one key point 
however, rich people's children 
getting comfy 
made up jobs when they fail at life.
How do they do that if the team is only 50 people and everybody
knows each other.
Jewish lives matter
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I don't think developing software is a comfy made-up job. That's to blame for the bad writing in all media. I don't play games for the writing though lol.
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Jewish lives matter
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found
the incel 
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When will Singularity, the ultimate B tier game get a sequel?! I don't even remember what happens, just that it was budget, clearly not AAA, and surprisingly ok!
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okay but why is this the case
like sure if the dev team was making their own engine from scratch i can see it taking years and years but arent most games these days even big ones made in like unreal engine and the like
why cant a team of 20 people make an unreal engine game in like 6-18 months
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The people who made games in the 80s and 90s didn't grow up playing computer games, so they were better workers
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The entire entertainment industry is incredibly coddled and soft. Used to be TV networks could turn out a scripted show every year with 23 episodes without fail. Now they manage 8 episodes a "season" and it takes them 2-3 years. Fricking pathetic.
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Sounds lol but this has to be absolutely true. Read Masters of Doom above software. Doom pretty much exists bc of non vidya related ideas and Doom's multiplayer exists because street fighter 2 came out and they thought why can't we do this too
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A 20 people team could do all of the programming for a game in 6-18 months, it's everything else that takes a million years. Like fi you look at the credits for a big game you'll see it's 10 different studios contracted to make 3d models, motion capture and voice acting; it's all stupid bloat just like how every game is 100gb.
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Starfield looked like to spent a hundred million dollars on designing hi-res 3d models of every book and coffee cup in the game and you only see it if you zoom in in your inventory. I didn't understand why they did that when the rest of the game looks 15yrs old
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Thank G-d AI will replace all those “people”
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Lara Croft's cone tits in 1998 vs her now
The amount of labor that goes into creating all the assets went way up, especially as the scope of the games also got way bigger.
Smaller games and the gazzilion simulators that buy assets can be made very quickly.
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Nothing has games. Even PC isn't getting a lot of releases. This year there were like 3 games even in the running for GOTY and one of them was fricking Alan Wake
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Ps5 has FF16 and GOW Ragnarok those are the only ones I care about and I'm patient enough to wait for a PC release of both.
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Ragnarok SUCKED! Liked the first well enough for a "movie" game. There's something off about every facet of Ragnarok, the writing is too quippy/modern, combat especially the heavy attack felt worse, pacing was atrocious, and the levels/puzzles felt less interesting.
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I heard
Corey B quit over creative differences which explains the Marvel-esque writing 
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Waiting
on FF7 Remake 2.
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I think we'll all be 20 years older by the time all three parts come out, plus the DLCs. In 2050 you'll be able to get the GOTY director's cut full version on steam for 9.99.
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