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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Uncategorized   >   Can consoles support large F2P games? They already do

Can consoles support large F2P games? They already do

By on May 27, 2022

Sony’s recent corporate presentation was heavily focused on F2P and live-service games.

Piers Harding-Rolls has an excellent analysis thread on Twitter, and these 2 charts leaped out at me.

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That chart shows that more a quarter of PS4 revenue is now from F2P games: live service games from third party publishers that are keeping the platform thriving. It’s worth noting that none of the five highlighted games are platform exclusives. You don’t need to have a Sony platform to play them.

The next chart shows how Sony’s strategy is evolving in response to this data.

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Sony currently has one “Live Services” Game as a first party publisher. By the financial year 2025, it intends to have 12 live service games.

This is going to be VERY interesting. Turning a “product”-led organisation into a “service-led” organisation is really hard. Development, marketing, publishing, financing, forcasting, operations, analytics and community management needs to change. It’s REALLY hard. I’ve had experience (both successful and abysmal failure) at trying to do it. Experiences like Eidos’ struggle to make Avengers into a Live Service game show that just throwing money at the issue is not enough.

Expect some high-profile failures on the way.

But don’t let anyone tell you that the console market is not big enough for F2P.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com