Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Sony Games Hemorrhaging Money

It is amazing to me that 2 years into the PS3 launch Sony Games is still losing US $400M in one quarter. Ouch.

That is because people are buying them as Blu-Ray players and not gaming machines...

That definitely can't help... They sort of out-thought themselves on that one.

They also made some pretty big mistakes in the HUGE income potential MMPORPG market.

Sony had the original big hit in this genre, Everquest. I think it may have peaked at over 800,000 customers paying $15.00 per month to play. Aside from the game sales themselves, they were getting 800k x 15$ = $12 million dollars a MONTH. (However, I imagine infrastructure overhead sucked its share)

Everquest had a good and very long run. There were many other companies trying to duplicate it's success but World of Warcraft has reached insane levels. I think the last number I saw was that they hit 11 million Subscribers.

So 11 mil times $15 = 165 MILLION per MONTH in gross INCOME!

Sony hoped to do the same with a new game based on the ever popular Star Wars franchise. It started off Hugely popular but then Sony trashed the game design team, brought in fresh blood who then made so many big changes to the game that the large majority of subscribers quit and went elsewhere. Game still runs but it's not nearly what they planned for.

Then they tried to build on the successful Everquest franchise by developing Everquest II. However, they tried to take EQ I which was a game for hard core gamers who were rewarded by increased risk and INSANELY long time investments for rewards and they dumbed it down signifigantly to appeal to the younger and more casual player base that WoW was attracting in record numbers.

This was a huge failure too because many of the hard core gamers who wanted a new EQ, got a new WoW with fancier graphics and even more restrictions on 'playing nice' and overall game mechanics. So it disappointed the EQ vets and WoW already had the rest of the market locked in.


Two very-multi-million dollar projects that are returning pennies in relation to the 'hundred million a month' incomes they were hoping for.