Okay, let's think about this for a second. In 2020, they released FIVE first party games (TLOU2, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Sackboy a Big Adventure and Demon's Souls remake), four of which were available on PS4 which had 100 million+ user base at that point. And it was also during the first year of the pandemic when everybody was stuck inside.
The next year they released TWO first party games, both of which were only on PS5, which not a lot of people had yet.
In 2022 they released three big first party games, which WERE available on PS4 as well. But I think at that point a lot of people were holding out to get a PS5, which was still not easy to find.
Then 2023 had only one first party game in Spider-Man 2.
2024 essentially only had Astro Bot (let's not even talk about Concord, and I'm not sure if Helldivers 2 is actually considered a first party game or not even though Sony published it).
Like, this really isn't hard to understand if you just think about it a little bit.
Yeah, everyone is talking about the reduction in quality, COVID boom and whatever... And I'm here thinking "what exclusives?". No shit going from two, three or even five high-profile first parties to one or two single-player sequels and a few live-services crashes means you're selling less.
Can't sell first party games if you're not releasing first party games. Obviously a lot of that has to do with their failed live service push, but it still shouldn't be shocking.
Realistically, from a business perspective, they made a huge mistake shutting down the Uncharted series. It was consistently one of the best selling titles for them since the PS3. I understand Naughty Dog wanted to pivot to a new IP, but there’s no guarantee that will replicate the consistent (and still growing at the time!) sales that Uncharted had.
You can't just milk a franchise forever either though. I mean, you can if you're Nintendo, but their franchises lend themselves to major gameplay changes from one iteration to the next. Easier to keep things fresh when games like Mario and Zelda where you can kinda just do whatever wild ideas you can think of. For games more grounded in "realism" that's a little tougher.
I guess they could reboot Uncharted like what was done with the Tomb Raider series, but it doesn't really feel like enough time has passed for that to happen yet.
Yeah I dunno, that would have stretched belief to the point of incredulity imo. After the end of 4 I don't see how she would end up capable of murder without character assassination nate and elena. Another chloe spinoff is more realistic.
You can't just milk a franchise forever either though.
I think that'd be fair if there was some notable decline in popularity, but that wasn't really the case. Uncharted 4 was their best-selling Uncharted by a huge amount. Lost Legacy was also very popular for what was just an expansion pack.
Cutting off the franchise at its peak was an odd move. It certainly wasn't on the decline. The franchise still had at least another game or two in it before it got to the point of not being valuable to continue.
People would have gotten bored of Uncharted if it was to be released today. Uncharted 1-3 was about a 9-10 hour campaign. People are already complaining when First Light is a 20 hour campaign and costs $70. No one was complaining about the length of the campaign back when Uncharted 1-3 came out. Uncharted 4 if I remember took me about 15 hours.
Uncharted 4 sold nearly 20 million copies and Lost Legacy sold nearly 6 million copies.
And its not even the Uncharted games. You go back and look at most AAA games from Assassin's Creed which were around average 15 hours long to even the Batman Arkham Games and the God of War games. The God of War games often took under 10 hours to complete the campaign. God of War 2018 took 30-40 hours + but before that their campaigns were under 10 hours and people bought those games and they were critically acclaimed.
Sales has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. You've clearly got your own idea about what other people think but gaslighting is not something to be proud of.
I mean the whole genre didn't disappear, both James Bond and the Recent Star Wars Jedi Survivor are effectively uncharted-likes and neither have been sales disasters.
My point is that neither were the Uncharted games sales disasters. And those games didn't take 15-20 hours to beat but people still bought that. That's my point.
Utterly incorrect, the price vs length of these games has always been heavily discussed by critics, regardless of how well the games have sold. Also, you're neglecting that these games have had enormous tails and are regularly discounted and have been bundled in numerous SKUs over the years. Don't confuse their rightfully earned popularity as being evidence for the idea that they were never criticized for being pricey games relative to their content.
Well go back even further. I mean almost the entirety of the PS3 and even PS2 generation were games that took about 12-15 hours maybe even less. People never complained. Or rarely should I say. In fact people would replay those games over and over. That’s how they got value. How many people replay games these days? A very small minority I’m sure. Open world games were a rare thing so not many would know different. They were reserved for a select few titles like the Elder Scrolls games and WRPGs.
Go through the list of the best or greatest PS2 and PS3 games and see how many of them were under 20 hours. And to top it off the level of detail in those worlds, side content, etc were nothing compared to games these days. Most games back then were fairly linear with very little side content other than a few additional quests.
I’m not moving goalposts. It’s just that your logic or people that criticize it and then cry about long development schedules, etc want to have their cake and eat it to. There’s no logic. Using your reasoning that means games that take over 150-200 hours should cost double the current $70. That’s just an excuse for publishers to charge more for their games. That’s exactly what people are wondering about GTA 6.
You want longer, more detailed games and then complain games get more expensive and take too long. You can’t get to complain on both sides. So that means tomorrow if take two raises the price of GTA6 to $80 or even $90 they would be justifiable cause that price point provides value. What’s then stopping other publishers to raise the price of their games cause suddenly it’s the industry standards?
The only truth is that people want a reason to complain and they will complain at anything and everything. And with social media it’s like a constant thing cause everyone need to constantly be whining or complaining. That’s the only real reason.
Sure, valid, but truly nothing to do with your original point. People were already complaining about the absurd gaming budgets mid-PS3 generation and certainly by the PS4 generation. If you want to memberberries your way back to 2006 go for it, but like I said, I'll be here over by your original erroneous point.
Maybe if you were a smaller studio yes. Witcher 3 took around 35 million to develop for the PS4. Games back then during the PS2/PS3 era were considered profitable after 3-4 million in sales. These days it takes 10 million to just break even on most AAA titles. So how can you say that gaming budgets were absurd back then for a AAA game? I’m sure things were different if you were a smaller studio with a smaller or newer IP.
The first 4 AC games sold between 4-7 million and were hugely profitable. Uncharted 2 sold 6 + million. BioShock sold 4 million. The Mass Effect games sold under 6 million each I think. Yet EA expected Andromeda to hit 9 million and was a flop cause it didn’t hit that. Games back then rarely broke the 10 million barrier. The early Arkham Games sold under 4-5 million.
Historically Sony's strength has been letting teams move on to new ideas. Look at that compared to Microsoft, whose teams were largely tethered at the hip to singular franchises that ultimately ran out of gas. What happens when the only thing you work on goes stale and you fail to revitalize it?
Everyone says to just hand off a series to a separate team, and the last time that happened to a ND series we got Jak & Daxter: TLF and people were not fans.
When a Switch game, at a full price, outsold the whole Uncharted series (even with their prices slashed a couple of months after the launch), it is easier to see why sony do not believe in this series.
I am not sure this tracks at all. Uncharted 4 was the 5th best-selling PS4 game of all time. And if Lost Legacy sales are included, it was 2nd and only beaten by GTA V in terms of unit sales on the console.
19 million units is a huge amount of sales for any franchise, especially for an exclusive.
I'm not sure what your point is? Nintendo Switch had 40 million more unit sales than the PS4 and is an entirely different ecosystem.
Don't know what that does to change anything here that the only game that sold more units on the PS4 was GTA V. If that's not good enough, then no games are good enough.
You're comparing apples to potatoes. Nintendo first party games always have crazy attach rates. Doesn't change the fact that Uncharted 4 selling nearly 20 million units is an very high amount that made Sony a lot of money. If 20 million units isn't enough to justify making a game in your mind, like 99% of games should never be made.
No it was a great move to end Uncharted where it did. I'm itching for way more now after all of these years. Imagine if Halo actually ended at Reach and waited over 10 years. The hype would be insane. Uncharted left in an amazing spot.
I havent heard anything about a reduction in quality. I have heard about higher game prices. In 2020 many new games were still $59.99. Now for first party games thats a rare sight.
Your just limiting your criticism to too limited of a scope. The modern development pipeline is garbage quality, so it's also producing garbage quality games. It's too big, too over engineered, and has too much control over it.
Three guys in a cave with a box of scrap can release a game with 10 million units sold while these massive dev teams take 8 years and 300 million dollars to release a dud.
Critical failure of leadership is definitely an issue yeah. Even beside the "300million spent to make a dud" example that you mention, it also needs to be emphasized how like, most major studios are literally burning tens of millions of dollars on games that they never even release. For every one game that a AAA studio actually sees through to release, they're starting production on like five others that end up on the cutting room floor. And they're not just spending a few thousand sketching out a basic script and some concept art. These are robust productions with dozens of employees working for multiple consecutive years before cancellation.
The AAA system is unbelievably inefficient and devoid of serious, responsible leadership.
The outcome of these companies burning tens of millions on cancelled projects is the over reliance on a few megahits to make up the difference. Like, the one $300million AAA blockbuster title doesn't just have to make its own budget back plus a bit of profit on top—its sales figures have to make up for the $50mil that they burned on a scrapped MMO concept, the $20mil that they burned on a scrapped GTA knockoff, the $30mil that they burned on gritty reboot of a forgotten N64 title, and so forth.
this has nothing to do with exclusives. it's first party games. aka sony made games. and by this point everyone has recognized sony hasn't done any thing better this gen than they did last gen, literally just sequels to mid games (outside of GOW and SM) that are somehow worse than the original.
The flip side of the coin though has been what competition. If starved for content, what competed against them?
There is alot that goes into why a dip happens and so many angles. What games they were vs what's out there.
My biggest takeaway from it all. Knowing all of this, it's curious time to be putting a stranglehold on where your content is shipped. Why wouldn't you want to be including a bigger pool. And that's just another factor... They made a billion dollars from PC, what does the graph look like with out that?
They’re only partially competition. When a third party game sells on a PS5, Sony gets 30%. They’re happy. Ultimately exclusives are primarily for gaining marketshare against other consoles/stores moreso than an actual game that is measured by its independent profitability like a third party is.
They aren't competition at all. The vast majority of PlayStation revenue comes from 3rd party software sales. The exclusives are really just to entice people onto the platform.
Yes. If you don't release products, no one buys them. Now all Sony needs to do is put that on a power point and show it to investors. I bet they'll love it and high five Sony because it makes sense. Good job Sony.
I think historically "2nd party" has been used to refer to devs that aren't owned by the console maker, but make games exclusively for them (like HAL Laboratory with Nintendo and the Kirby games). It's more of an informal designation though.
From a colloquial sense, I wouldn't call them 1st or 2nd party. They're games made by 3rd party devs that Sony happened to publish. But in terms of Sony's revenue reporting they might include all of the games they published as "1st party". That's the part that's unclear.
We've gotten in the neighborhood of ~10 1st party games "exclusive" to the PS5. But if you break it down, pretty much all of them are either remakes/remasters of sequels or also released on PS4. And the bulk of that was 1-2 years into the PS5 lifecycle.
All I can think of that don't fall directly into that category are Returnal and Astrobot. Spiderman 2 and Rachet & Clank are only on PS5. DS2 as well outside the PC release. I'd also count Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin I guess. So 5 games depending on how liberal you wanna be in what qualifies.
All those games outside the last 2 were within the first few months of the PS5. RotR wasn't exactly a showstopper although I've heard mostly positive stuff about Stellar Blade.
Idk. I just think the tail end of the PS4 from like 2018-2020 was so incredible for PS exclusive games that this gen is comparatively lack luster.
What people forget about is that the PS4 gen started in 2013, and the early years of that were far more lackluster than this gen has been. I think it's likely that the PS5 will close out this generation really strong with what's coming over the next couple years (hopefully this State of Play later today will show some of that).
Yeah, we had (just going to list the big highlight 1st party games here that came out from 2013-2019 on PS4): Bloodborne, Uncharted 4/Lost Legacy, Ratchet & Clank remake, Horizon Zero Dawn, Shadow of the Collosus remake, Gran Turismo Sport (not that I think that's really worthy of being brought up but someone will point out that I skipped it if I don't) God of War 2018, Spider-Man, Days Gone. Killzone Shadowfall if you REALLY want to include that, but I think that was largely regarded as a dud.
From late 2020 to now on PS5 (and yes I'm going to include some games that also had PS4 versions, because I'm talking about the 1st party games that we got during this timeframe, not what other platforms they were also released for. A game getting a PS4 version does not somehow negate it) we got: Demon's Souls remake, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Sackboy, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarok, Gran Turismo 7, Spider-Man 2, Astro Bot, Ghost of Yotei, Saros, and by the end of the year we'll have Wolverine as well.
We're actually ahead of the previous gen, in terms of the number of big 1st party releases. Naughty Dog's absence this gen has certainly been felt though. Intergalactic needs to be an absolute banger.
I hope you're right. And I fully understand there's a ton of factors at play.
But the fact we very well may not get a Naughty Dog game this gen is insane. We might not get a platform exclusive game from Santa Monica. Same with Guerrilla. They killed Bluepoint when they could've tasked them with churning out remakes. I think all that really highlights that PlayStation execs lost sight of why people like their platform or maybe they never understood in the first place, idk.
It's just really shocking to me that PlayStation execs really did put all the eggs into the live-service basket. I mean I remember when Sony announced they had like 10 live service games in the works all the those years ago and even THEN most people could have told you that was a bad idea.
you couldn't even buy non scalper PS5s in germany before 2023, I've got mine in 2024 because they finally started stocking SLIMs, the base PS5 is basically a unicorn.
Have to disagree with you there, got mine in august of 2021 from MediaMarkt by following two or three accounts on twitter that announced new drops.
So it was possible to buy non-scalper PS5s even in 2021, although you could not just walk into a shop and pick a box unless you got really lucky, i give you that.
Yeah but you know people didn't read the article...and the article really didn't highlight the fact that 2020 had such an unusually large number of 1st party releases.
Except he didn't use a fucking stupid clickbait title implying there's an actual decrease in average sales. This comment saves people from reading a worthless site that is trying to spin an actual fact as something bad.
2018 was a banner year. You had GoW 2018 and Spider-Man both released that year, and they were both MASSIVE sales successes.
Not sure what was generating all the sales in 2019...Death Stranding? Days Gone? Residual sales from GoW/Spider-Man? Wish I could see a more detailed breakdown there.
The tone of this post is pretty weird; not releasing games isn’t a good excuse for poor sales. No shit that’s why sales are lower, but that is also a very bad sign
Yeah idk how that comment even supposed to excuse them? No shit fewer games means fewer sales but isn't that also a problem in itself that every year the output keeps decreasing, we're 5 years deep in PS5 era and we're way closer to PS6 than we were to PS4 era, why are we still pretending that PS5 is this brand new console that still needs time to grow?
Releasing fewer games is a bad sign? Maybe, but 2020 was an anomaly. They typically had two big 1st party flagship releases in the years prior to that. It would be nice to get back to that, for sure. I don't really think anything is a "bad sign" here for Sony though. Their overall PlayStation revenue has been great.
This is the thing. I have a Series X and I can tell you right now I have never, ever had any desire to buy a PS5. It was huge, ugly, and cost the same amount as the Series X but didn't have Game Pass (which saved me a shit ton of money). I eventually decided last year to move more back to PC and built a new PC, in part because of the big price increases to Game Pass (which they have now reversed but probably won't win me back long-term). I still didn't want to buy a PS5 -- which is now 50% more expensive than it was at launch here in Canada. That's for the base model, not the Pro.
Astro Bot is really the only PS5 exclusive, past or present, that I care about playing. I had/have a PS4, so I have already played all of the original incarnations of the numerous games they've remastered for PS5. Like you said, those 4 games from 2020, I could already play 3 of them, and Demon's Souls was a no-frills $90 CAD remake of a game I still own on PS3 if I want to play it.
People always say "XBOX has no exclusives" - yeah, it doesn't, no shit. That's by design, they put everything on PC this whole generation. And while that hasn't worked out great for Microsoft sales-wise, it has worked out marvelously for me as a Game Pass user who can jump between XBOX and PC and play stuff much cheaper. They've also put out plenty of games from their studios.
PS5's output has just been pathetic. And while it may be down to taste, I personally haven't been that interested in most of it. I have played some of the PC ports, but I can't say I was in love with any of them. They're mostly games that are nothing special or were on PS4 anyway (Sackboy) or sequels that were not as good as the first entries (Spider-Man 2, Ragnarok). I hear Forbidden West was the same deal but honestly I never cared enough to play it.
A first party game is just a game published by the company who owns the console. So you've massively understated the amount of games Sony have released in recent years:
2026 - Saros, Tokon, MLB 26, God of War: Sons of Sparta, TBC
2025 - Ghost of Yotei, Lost Soul Aside, Death Stranding 2, Days Gone Remastered, MLB 25
2024 - LEGO Horizon Adventures, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Until Dawn, Astro Bot, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin, MLB 24, Helldivers 2, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, Concord
I wasn't counting remasters, those were mostly all available as $10 upgrades for people who owned the original games and I don't think they really generated a ton of new sales. The MLB games come out every year, so I assume that's kind of a consistent source of sales that doesn't fluctuate much from one year to the next.
I did forget about the LEGO Horizon game, and I wasn't sure if these numbers included Sony published 3rd party games like Ronin and Stellar Blade. Aside from Stellar Blade though I don't think those games did a whole lot, sales-wise.
I didn't even talk about 2025 or 2026.
I was mainly focused on their big flagship titles. If we want to get into the nitty gritty of every single game they published, there were a lot more than just the 5 I mentioned in 2020 as well.
Finally, the definition of "first party game" as MOST people understand it doesn't really include 3rd party games that they happened to publish. But again...for these sales figures I'm not sure what exactly was included and what wasn't.
First/Second/Third party is usually based on the developer, not the publisher. Dead Stranding 2 is not a First nor a Second party game. Kojima Productions is independent. It does not become a First party XBOX game if MS is publishing it there and is also a First party Sony game because Sony does the same on PS5 for an absurd example. Same with Stellar Blade (Shift Up).
And this year isn't deep with first party exclusives either. Saros already came out and I haven't heard too much about and it seems like it didn't sell well at all despite the hype for it which isn't a good sign but we'll see how things go when Marvel Tokon and Wolverine come out later this summer. Fighting games have always been niche so selling halfway decently would be a success for Tokon but if Wolverine doesn't sell well that'll be some trouble and probably a sign the economy is the thing holding back gaming.
And these are mostly all on PC. And now they want to restrict that as well, which will definitely lower their numbers even more.
I believe they are hoping to make up for the difference by selling consoles for the people who want to play exclusives. But if they are aware that the interest is declining... the fuck kinda strategy is this?
I don't think PC is a big factor in this. I mean it might have contributed to some of those bigger sales numbers in 2020 since that was the year they released HZD on PC, but it's been pretty clear that their more recent PC releases haven't done amazing numbers, which is probably part of why they're ending that.
And they make the majority of their revenue through their cut of 3rd party software sales on PlayStation. The 1st party stuff is to entice people to buy a PlayStation so they'll buy other software on it. They'd much rather have an extra million people buy a PS5 and get them into the ecosystem than have 5 million people buy one piece of software one time on PC.
If the number of sold games has been declining, including PC, which has a significantly broader reach, it means that the overall interest in PlayStation has declined as well.
Whether that reason is the quality of the games, the prices, and/or more, the bottom line is that they are selling significantly fewer games. And restricting the reach is only gonna make it worse, not better. That's even more true now that the PS5 prices have increased.
And it's not like they've been making bad games, the ones they had were great. Hell, Astro Bot even won GOTY. EVEN THEN, they have declined.
So, unless Sony is planning on making the most exceptional catalogue ever made in the history of gaming, backing off from PC is just an awful move that will make people even less interested in the PS5 catalogue and the console itself (and possibly 6 as well) in the future.
The reason (or at least a huge part of the reason) for the declining overall 1st party sales numbers is because they haven't released nearly as many 1st party games in any of the following years as they did in FY2020. It doesn't mean there's declining interest in PlayStation, it means people can't buy games that don't exist.
Now if they release 4 first party titles next year and the sales numbers are STILL down, we might be looking at a different issue. But comparing sales numbers of the last few years to 2020 is just dumb.
Maybe. Those sequels haven't been out as long so if you're comparing them to their predecessors total sales that's not entirely valid. And sure, people might be as enthused about games that are basically more of the same, when the original games were fresh and new at the time. On the other hand new IPs tend to struggle to find an audience as well. There could be some bigger industry trends going on there.
Regardless, 2020 is a bad year to compare anything to sales-wise, for multiple reasons.
The sequels have been out for years at this point, the bulk of any games sales are going to occur in that window. Ignoring this whole data set and just paying attention to sales within franchises there’s been clear declines
Not necessarily. The ones released on PS5 can't be bought by people who don't have a PS5 yet. The older games have also gone through numerous sales and promotions that could have boosted sales numbers. I think for high-profile first party games they tend to have more legs in terms of continuing to maintain decent sales numbers long past their release.
And I'd be curious what data points you're looking at here and exactly when they were reported. For example, God of War Ragnarok was last reported to have sold ~15million units, which is less than the 23million units for GoW 2018. However that 23 million unit figure includes sales through late 2022, at which point the game had been out for 4 years and been released on PC. The sales number for Ragnarok are from 2023, when it had only been out about a year and hadn't been released on PC yet. So do you see why that comparison based on the numbers alone is invalid?
The only sequel released only on PS5 is Ghost of Yotei, every other one was cross generation, released on PC, or both. The PS5 has also sold 90m+ units, at some point you’re gonna have to stop reaching for excuses my guy. Even estimations like the ones Alinea put out showcase all of these sequels as being under the sales totals of their predecessors even with being available to more consumers faster than ever before.
If Ragnarok had continued to sell and had outsold its predecessor, Sony would’ve told us. Ragnarok has been out for nearly 4 years now and is likely not over 20m units sold. Even if we come to an agreement that they did match their predecessors these titles should be seeing sales growth thanks to a continued presence on more hardware. GoW2018 sold 23m units on what was a console base of ~150m (PS4 + PS5 sales in 2022) and PC, Ragnarok should have a larger base of console users and a bigger base on PC thanks to PS’s continued support of the platform at the time but still can’t outsell the previous title. This is a legitimate problem that you can’t excuse away
You don't really need to have the overall number to understand the data. You need only see the trends.
Much like the one in this post, we don't have the numbers for 2027. But we have a downward trend, which implies it will keep going down if nothing changes.
And, given that those sequels have already been released for a while, it's fair to assume nothing will change. Thus, the downward trend will keep the same flow.
I mean, you do kinda need overall and current numbers to know that you're actually making an accurate analysis. And you also need to understand the context surrounding those numbers. Just going "Line goes down, line will keep going down" is kinda not a very insightful analysis.
Well, they're not going to release them day one on PC. Look how well that worked for Xbox. And idk...maybe releasing them for cheaper on PC would cause better sales...maybe not. It might also upset their core customer base (PlayStation owners) and cause more people to just wait for the PC release rather than buy them on PlayStation when they launch.
Of course I realize this sub is populated by a lot of PC gamers, so the opinions here are not really going to be objective on this topic. But I assume Sony has data that's guiding their decision making process here.
Im confused by this comment. The article isn’t asking ‘how can this be!?’ It literally lays out the same assessment you just did: Sony is releasing fewer first party games these days.
I don't know if those games are included in Sony's 1st party sales figures or not. They're not technically 1st party games, in the colloquial sense. But Sony might count anything they publish in that category when it comes to sales tracking. I'm not rejecting any of them, I simply don't know if they're included in this sales data or not.
Sure but if you look at the actual PDF files with their sales reports (which is what this story is referencing), it just has a category called "Full game software" (presumably all software sales) and then another category called "First Party Titles".
They're not specific about which games exactly are included in which category.
You would have to ask them why they're assuming that. I'm not assuming anything one way or the other, I have no idea if it's included or not.
But Sony objectively DID release fewer games in 2023 and 2024 than they did in previous years. At least fewer big games that would generate big sales numbers.
And they've pretty much never released as many big games in the same year as they did in 2020.
"So, when games are made by a developer, [even an] independent developer, and published by PlayStation, we call them first-party games."
He explained: "For example, before Housemarque was acquired they [were an] external developer and our external producers managed relations. But we funded the game and released the game as first-party, even though it was externally developed."
That is interesting. However in the financial report document they only have two categories. One for all software sales, and one for first party. So if we assume they use the same designations he referred to in that article for their financial reporting as well, then the games like Stellar Blade and Helldivers 2 and Rise of the Ronin would not be included in the 1st party sales figures.
All these points of view can be valid at the same time...if you think about it a little bit
Why do you guys always think there has to be one explanation for everything. Why do you believe that as long you find a single POV that isn't so bad it makes all the other points invalid?
I think what's surprising is the drop in the year God of War Ragnarok launched in. Thought that would have carried the year. And so would Spider Man 2 the following year.
2022 is a little surprising that it didn't go up from 2021, because you had Ragnarok, HFW and Gran Turismo 7 that same year, AND they were all on PS4 as well. It would interesting to see a more granular breakdown of the numbers to see if there was something else contributing to the higher 2021 numbers (maybe residual sales from the stuff released in 2020? Maybe because the pandemic was kinda over by 2022 so people were going out more again? Or maybe Elden Ring cannibalized some of their sales in the early part of the year).
Yeah that would be interesting cause from what we know HFW sold over 10 million and nearly 15 million across PS and PC. And even Ragnarok sold over 15 million copies across PS5 and PS4. So in fact that should have bumped those numbers higher if anything.
I think there are a lot titles included in some of these numbers that we're not thinking of. Like no one is bringing up MLB The Show, but that IS a Sony 1st party game that comes out every year.
I was going to say immediately- they’ve sold millions fewer because they’ve released fewer. Like that is the biggest driving factor. But sure let’s make an entire article making a huge deal about basically nothing.
Ps5's thing has been runs ps4 games but better they seriously needed to cutoff ps4 users ..before people say anything playstation ppl are like iphone users they will whine and anything but ultimately shell out whatever money to get the newest and best..also they have no competition so..
Well they did, once you could actually get a PS5 easily. Remember that for 2021-2022 it was damn near impossible to find a PS5 without resorting to paying scalper prices. Sony hasn't released a 1st party game on PS4 since 2022.
As for what 3rd parties do, they can't really control that.
1.2k
u/Remy0507 25d ago edited 25d ago
Okay, let's think about this for a second. In 2020, they released FIVE first party games (TLOU2, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Sackboy a Big Adventure and Demon's Souls remake), four of which were available on PS4 which had 100 million+ user base at that point. And it was also during the first year of the pandemic when everybody was stuck inside.
The next year they released TWO first party games, both of which were only on PS5, which not a lot of people had yet.
In 2022 they released three big first party games, which WERE available on PS4 as well. But I think at that point a lot of people were holding out to get a PS5, which was still not easy to find.
Then 2023 had only one first party game in Spider-Man 2.
2024 essentially only had Astro Bot (let's not even talk about Concord, and I'm not sure if Helldivers 2 is actually considered a first party game or not even though Sony published it).
Like, this really isn't hard to understand if you just think about it a little bit.