2023 was by all accounts a landmark year in gaming, with masterpieces like Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3 dropping left and right. If this morning’s 2024 Sony earnings call was any indication, though, the coming year will be far dryer by comparison.
Sayahiko Hayakawa, the general manager of Sony’s finance department, stated in the meeting the company doesn’t plan on releasing “any new major existing franchise titles next fiscal year,” referencing both God of War and Marvel’s Spider-Man as two of those major franchises. The next fiscal year begins this April and doesn’t end until March 2025, so PlayStation gamers will have more than a year to wait before seeing the next big Sony release.
This is, obviously, bad news for anyone who wanted to play something like The Last of Us Part III or maybe that Days Gone sequel Bend Studio’s been hinting at. Everything currently available on PS5 is all you’re going to get from Sony’s first-party studios for a good, long while—which, granted, is something Sony is also aware of. In the earnings call, which can be read in full here, Hayakawa anticipated a dip in sales of both software and console units, but Sony is also going to pump the brakes on studio acquisitions this year, so the impact on their bottom line will be negligible.
There does seem to be a silver lining, however. In an investor Q&A after the earnings call, Sony president Hiroki Totoki expressed a desire to bring more first-party titles to PC, following in the footsteps of SIE’s Uncharted and Horizon franchises. “If you have strong first party content, not only with our console but also other platforms like computers, first party can be grown with multiplatform and that can help operating profit to improve,” Totoki told investors, and noted the company is seeking to “proactively” take more of its games beyond the PlayStation and to PC.
This goes against the methodology of former PlayStation president Jim Ryan, who ported only certain titles to PC with heavy delays. But with Ryan stepping down, the stage seems set for more PlayStation games on PC. For players who own both a PS5 and a gaming PC, this will no doubt come as welcome news—and if it comes with a chance of Bloodborne finally making the leap, I’m all for it.
