Sony outlined several of its broader plans for games during a business call on May 23rd.
One of the topics of discussion was cloud gaming. During the call, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan noted that the company recognizes “mobility in gaming habits to be an increasingly important trend, and the cloud will be fundamental to allowing us, or indeed anybody else, to exploit that trend.”
He went on to say that PlayStation has “some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud that will unfold over the course of the coming months.”
It remains to be seen what these plans will be, but one has to imagine they include mobile in some capacity. Indeed, while PlayStation does support game streaming on consoles for select titles through its premium PlayStation Plus subscription, that doesn’t extend to mobile. By contrast, this has been a core feature of rival services like Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia GeForce Now, Amazon Luna and Google’s shuttered Stadia.
For now, PlayStation only lets players access its big games on mobile through Remote Play, which lets users effectively cast titles from their consoles. PlayStation also says it plans to release dedicated mobile games, with the first potentially releasing as early as this year. Overall, the company anticipates that 50 percent of its releases in 2025 will be either PC or mobile games.
It’s unclear to what extent cloud will factor into that, but it’s an undeniably fast-growing market nonetheless. Besides the aforementioned services, streaming has also been at the centre of Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard. In fact, the U.K. actually blocked the deal out of concerns that Microsoft owning the Call of Duty maker would present an unfair advantage in the cloud sector.
Elsewhere in the call, PlayStation discussed some other areas of the business. Chief among these was the company’s commitment to its first-party catalogue. According to PlayStation, its investment in exclusive new IP will hit 50 percent in 2025, up significantly from 20 percent in 2019. Of these new titles, the company expects over half of the spending to go into live services.
Sony has been talking about significantly expanding its online portfolio. While it’s built up a beloved catalogue including the likes of The Last of Us, God of War and Spider-Man, the majority of these titles are single-player only. Therefore, the company wants to launch a variety of live services to complement its single-player output, including a standalone The Last of Us multiplayer experience. Sony also recently acquired Destiny maker Bungie to help with its live service efforts.
The full investor presentation can be found here.
