It’s hard to imagine a company with a greater influence on consumer electronics than Sony. You can trace a direct line from the Walkman -- the first portable media player -- to the smartphone. Today Sony is a massive force in gaming, making the PlayStation and publishing games for it and other platforms. Sony image sensors are in iPhones as well as its own mirrorless cameras. Not to mention the OLED TVs; smartphones; noise-canceling headphones; music, tv, and film publishing; and, yes, robot dogs.
Sony sold 3.3 million PS5’s in the three months ended June 30th, up from 2.4 million consoles in the same period last year. But the end of the PS5 shortage isn’t the only good news for Sony; the comparatively weak Japanese yen also contributed to higher sales across its games, music, and financial units, Bloomberg notes.
What the Golf?, the only existing golf game (says me), comes to PS4 and PS5 “with all current updates later this year,” says a press release sent to The Verge.
Also, developer Triband is updating the Switch and Steam versions with the Among Us-inspired levels.
If you’ve never played What the Golf?... here, watch the Switch trailer.
With no movement on resolving Hollywood’s strikes by actors and writers, the third animated Spider-Man movie, Beyond the Spider-Verse is going from March 29th, 2024 (a date now filled by the sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife) to entirely unscheduled.
Gran Turismo will have a “sneak peek” launch on its previously scheduled August 11th date, but plans for more showings have been pushed back to the 25th.
Kraven the Hunter was set for October 6th and has been pushed back to August 30th, 2024, while Venom 3 now has a release date of July 12th, 2024, and fellow Spider-Man spinoff Madame Web moved up two days to February 16th.
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Verge Score
Sony’s latest flagship earbuds are excellent on multiple fronts, but the lack of an ecosystem will hold them back in the not-too-distant future.
We knew it was over a billion dollars, but PlayStation boss Jim Ryan’s unredacted letter suggests CoD represented $800 million in PlayStation revenue in the United States alone, and — I think that says $1.5 billion, right? — worldwide. (That’s in 2021 specifically.)
Those players represent way more money to Sony than that, though: Ryan says CoD players spend (what looks to me like) $15.9 billion per year, on average, on everything else they buy.
Then again, some PlayStation gamers play nothing but CoD, we just learned.
While we listen to Dr. Bailey’s testimony, a storm is unfolding elsewhere in the FTC v. Microsoft case. The court uploaded a document earlier from Sony that included confidential financial information that wasn’t properly redacted. Now all the documents have suddenly disappeared.
It looks like some redacted the documents with a pen and when you scan them in it’s easy to see the redactions. Reporters and Sony’s competition will have downloaded all the documents as they were in the public domain, so the damage is done:
• Horizon Forbidden West apparently cost $212 million over five years with 300 employees
• 1 million gamers play nothing but Call of Duty
• Sony says only one more Call of Duty game was guaranteed to come to PlayStation
That’s according to Sony gaming boss Jim Ryan, whose redacted letter to the FTC wasn’t redacted all that well...
Here’s what my elf eyes see in the text:
In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty. In 2021, Call of Duty players spent an average of [116?] hours per year playing Call of Duty. Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise.
So yeah, Sony certainly would miss out on some some console/subscription sales if CoD someday becomes Xbox exclusive.
We knew that Sony’s marketing deal with Activision expired in 2024, but that apparently doesn’t include a 2024 installment of CoD.
“[T]he last game covered by the contract is a Call of Duty title to be released in late 2023,” reads part of a letter from PlayStation boss Jim Ryan that someone didn’t properly redact.
Still, Activision reportedly planned to bring CoD games to PlayStation with or without the contract, and Microsoft has repeatedly promised the same.
A big letter from Sony president Jim Ryan to the FTC wasn’t redacted properly, and we’ve been furiously hunting for secrets! First up: Horizon Forbidden West apparently cost $212 million over five years with 300 employees.
The Last of Us Part II: $220 million for some 200 employees, if we’re reading right. Development started in 2014 right after the original game was released, though that was already public info.
A new exhibit has just dropped and it’s full of important financial data that has been marked out with a black pen. Unfortunately that doesn’t keep it secret once you scan it in, and oops everything is no longer secret.
FTC v. Microsoft day three was all about Sony’s objection to the Activision Blizzard deal, its bet against Game Pass, and a cloudy future.
PlayStation chief Jim Ryan is asked why Xbox games resonate better with customers in the US than outside the country:
“Many of their games involve an element of shooting and online multiplayer. Both of which typically are more popular in the US than they are outside of the US.”
We’re going to get a lot of testimony from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan. The video will run for 1 hour and 10 minutes in total. Ryan confirms Sony tracks Microsoft’s console sales.
FTC: How have Xbox gen 9 consoles performed in terms of sales?
Ryan: Like us they have been troubled by supply shortages we understand, but demand for their products is robust.
Day one of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing was all about a surprise email, Xbox exclusives, and a costly cloud.
I love the chaos of this FTC v. Microsoft hearing, where confidential documents are dragged to court alongside a PS5. Philip Pacheco from Getty Images perfectly captures the mayhem outside a US courthouse building, as FTC attorneys juggle with a witness binder for Sarah Bond, head of Xbox creator experience, and a PS5 console.
Day two of the hearing kicks off at 8:30AM PT / 11:30AM ET and you can bet we’ll be covering the less chaotic proceedings inside the courtroom live right here.
The FTC vs. Microsoft case kicks off today and we’re gradually hearing more about Sony’s opposition to Microsoft’s proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition. In a deposition, PlayStation chief Jim Ryan says that Sony would no longer share confidential details about next-gen PlayStation consoles with a Microsoft-owned Activision. “We simply could not run the risk of a company that was owned by a direct competitor having access to that information.”
