PlayStation State of Play Underscores One Big Advantage Against Xbox
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PlayStation’s annual State of Play stream showcased 15 titles Wednesday that largely overshadowed the smaller Xbox Developer Direct stream earlier in January.
Only two games in PlayStation’s showcase have 2024 release dates, with the bulk of the undated titles a mix of new sequels, remakes and remasters playing on the strengths of established franchises.
Except for one.
Hideo Kojima, developer of “Death Stranding” and its upcoming sequel that closed the stream with a lengthy trailer, joined PlayStation Studios boss Hermen Hulst at the stream’s end to announce he and Sony are working on a new IP in the “action espionage” genre, tentatively titled “PHYSINT.”
That labeling is significant, due to Kojima’s decades-long work at Konami creating and leading its “Metal Gear Solid” games before his contentious exit in 2015. “Solid” is widely seen as the foundational franchise for stealth-action games, with highly popular franchises like “The Last of Us” drawing influence from it.
Sony developing a potential spiritual successor to “Solid” at a time when Konami is aggressively pushing back into video games with its “Metal Gear Solid 3” remake and multiple “Silent Hill” titles is already a pointedly competitive move. But Kojima’s stated hope that the new IP will “transcend the barriers between film and video games” is an essential reminder of how much more entrenched Sony is in multimedia than Microsoft, to the point where the stream concluded with a drone shot of Kojima and Hulst that ascended out of the soundstage they were in to capture the Sony Pictures lot.
In addition to being a leader in film, TV and music, Sony is the de facto leader in console games, where its hardware has vastly outnumbered Microsoft’s.
The addition of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft Gaming in October has certainly paid dividends in expanding its gaming revenue. Per the tech giant’s earnings Tuesday, Xbox content and services’ 61% year-over-year increase for the last quarter of 2023 came almost entirely from the addition of the publishing group responsible for “Call of Duty,” “Diablo” and “Candy Crush.”
With Activision at play, gaming was Microsoft’s third biggest business last quarter, rising past Windows and LinkedIn.
Still, consumer media just isn’t where Microsoft’s priorities are, as opposed to Sony.
Through PlayStation Productions, the company has already released successful adaptations in HBO’s “The Last of Us” and its own “Uncharted” film adaptation to go alongside those games while continuing to make highly successful “Spider-Man” games alongside that IP’s box-office hits. A film adaptation of “Metal Gear Solid” has also been in development at Sony for some time, and Kojima himself is developing a “Death Stranding” film with A24.
A new franchise built from the ground up for gaming and film purposes is a significant doubling down of such goals for multimedia success, wherein different mediums of expression for the same IP don’t just coexist but complement one another. Even Sony Music is now capitalizing on microtransactions the way gaming companies do through extensive partnerships with Fortnite and Roblox.
It’s not that Microsoft hasn’t tried to do this with its gaming IP. Paramount+ has a second season of “Halo” due in February, and a series adaptation of “Fallout” will hit Prime in April. Likewise, the company still owns Minecraft, which predates and functions as a platform for multimedia brand partnerships in a similar manner to Fortnite and Roblox.
But as much as Activision Blizzard’s entry into its big picture is all right for earnings, the process of merging those operations with its own has gone awry. Microsoft announced as many as 1,900 layoffs at the publisher and throughout Xbox in January, replacing Blizzard president Mike Ybarra with Johanna Faries, who led the “Call of Duty” business for several years.
The moves come as a blow to workers after the highly anticipated departure of Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick at the end of 2023. Kotick’s final years culminated in federal and state investigations over rampant misconduct throughout the company that led to hefty settlements, most recently $54 million in December.
Faries’ role shift also calls into question the future of the publishers under Kotick. The Blizzard segment achieved a record quarter last year, making Ybarra’s ousting peculiar, especially after “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III” failed to grab the No. 1 bestseller spot for 2023 under Faries, a feat it normally pulls off with its annual entries.
With such a vast reduction in headcount, competing against PlayStation on the games front will be more difficult than ever. All the more reason for Sony to maximize its multimedia synchronicity when it maintains such a significant advantage.
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