SIE examining future mergers with game development companies. In a recent interview with Nikkei, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan discussed the possibility of the acquisition of game development studios.
It would seem that develop acquisition is shaping up to be an essential part of the next generation of console hardware. In a recent interview with Nikkei, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan discussed the possibility of the acquisition of game development studios.
This is exciting news and would mark the first acquisitions by Sony since they purchased inFamous develops Sucker Punch in 2011. Much of the interview, translated here on ResetEra, center around precisely what Sony can offer to studios that it acquires. Ryan emphasized the size of the PlayStation’s footprint on the market, with a user count of 94 million consumers.
“Companies new to the games industry looking at the market with hope is something we definitely welcome,” Ryan said. He continued, “Sony Interactive Entertainment has 25 years of experience in the games industry and has big assets.”
Ryan’s statements echo comments he already made during an investor meeting in May of this year, where he initially mentioned Sony’s desire to acquire new studios. This all comes hot on the heels of Microsoft having a bumper year for new purchases, picking up seven new studios across 2018-2019. Microsoft’s acquisitions included Obsidian Entertainment, Playground Games, Ninja Theory, and inXile. It would seem that both companies are planning on having strong sources of first-party games as they enter into the competitive first year of the next generation of console.
Ryan also talked about the importance of cloud services and game streaming for the next generation, speaking about Sony’s partnership with Microsoft to develop a cloud streaming service for PlayStation users. He did, however, restate Sony’s commitment to hardware, mentioning that the proper development of cloud services will take time, and pointing out that Sony’s console market has been in development for 25 years, so expecting cloud services to quickly replace the console market is not the right way to look at things.
Instead, Ryan sees the home console market, and cloud services, operating hand-in-hand to provide consumers with as much choice about where and when they play their games as possible.
One more exciting bit of information from the interview is about the profitability of hardware. “In the past, every time we transitioned to a new game console, we have made a deficit with development costs,” Ryan said, although he was unable to go into specifics about the new generation of hardware. “The profit margin has steadily increased in the past few years, and I am optimistic that it will continue in the future.”
This may be, in part, down to their plan to use a combination of AMD CPUs and GPUs in the new hardware, rather than explicitly developing chips which then demand standalone production chains to produce.
We will be keeping an eye on any studio acquisitions that Sony makes, and if they have made some recently, then I imagine that we are rapidly getting to the point where it would make sense to announce them. Be sure to stay tuned to Gamepur for anymore breaking news around this story.
