Understanding the Sony leaks, why Sony might be fricked.

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: