Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s Chief Financial Officer, recently made a comment that we find hard to believe because we just don’t see the basis for it.
With the PlayStation brand celebrating its 30th anniversary this year (and the picture seems to be a reference to the PlayStation 5 Pro), there is a lot of intellectual property (IP), and a lot of it has been created within the Sony organization over thirty years. With each generation of consoles, it has been important for Sony to create new IP, and in the case of PlayStation 5, almost half of the PlayStation studios are working on it. Despite this, it seems that Sony’s management has a different, almost exaggeratedly strange view.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Totoki said that whether it’s games, movies or animation, Sony doesn’t have enough of the IP it has cultivated from the start. This alleged shortage is in the early stages of being addressed, with Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida saying the company has plans to prioritize new IP, but Totoki admitted that Sony’s popular existing franchises have done a great job of appealing to new audiences, as PC ports have brought them to players who have been left out.
Over the past decade, Sony has released a lot of new IP: Astro Bot, Bloodborne, Days Gone, Death Stranding, Detroit: Become Human, Ghost of Tsushima, Helldivers, Horizon, Returnal, The Last Guardian, The Last of Us, Until Dawn. So there are some very successful IPs here! However, Totoki believes that creating new IPs from scratch is essential for the development of Sony and PlayStation. These comments understandably upset the audience, as there were 150 PlayStation cameos in Astro Bot, which was released on Friday.
If Yoshida and Totoki’s comments were referring to the film and animation sector, we can accept it, because Sony may have shortcomings in these segments, but it is in an absolutely good position when it comes to video games!
