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So Sony tries to play with AI to sell more PlayStations

2 months ago babelfish

So Sony tries to play with AI to sell more PlayStations

PlayStation 5 sells a lot, but Sony doesn't earn enough: in order not to cut studies and budgets, the Japanese software house could try to increase its audience by winking at those who have never picked up a controller, thanks to AI…

Sony's latest data relating to its gaming division have frightened the shareholders of the Japanese giant devoted to entertainment quite a bit. Despite having a console like PlayStation 5 in its hands, which no longer even sees Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S rival in the rearview mirror, the Japanese software house is unable to earn enough. According to a calculation by CNBC , the operating margin of the gaming sector for Sony was just under 6% in the quarter ended in December compared to above 9% in the December quarter of 2022, which is why it is urgent to expand the audience, even at a cost to let AI play for us.

WHY SONY NEEDS CASUAL GAMER

The idea is to increase your fan base by targeting newbies. That is, to those who until now have not held a pad in their hand because they were scared by the complexity of the game mechanics. The arrival of smartphones has allowed software houses to reach unsuspected gamers in terms of age, social background and habits. The trouble, however, is that almost everyone is left playing games on their cell phones.

First of all, consoles require a much different investment than the few cents spent to purchase this or that app on a mobile phone but above all they tend to intimidate those who have never approached them before. However, if we consider that Marvel's Spider-Man 2 , PlayStation 5's flagship title last autumn, cost Insomniac Games – and therefore Sony – around 300 million dollars, a stratospheric sum that further erodes already slim margins, it is imperative to look elsewhere of gamers.

NINTENDO'S HAPPY EXAMPLE

Nintendo understood this in the first decade of the new Millennium, when it debuted the DS (November 2004) and Wii (November 2006) with a plethora of titles ( Brain Training, Wii Fit, Wii Sports, Wii Play , etc.) designed for those who were first experience with a console. Result? The DS has exceeded 155 million copies, the Wii the milestone of 100 million.

If you look at the best-selling titles for DS, Nintendogs (a Tamagotchi from the 2000s) is in second place with 23.96 million copies, and in fourth place is Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How old is your brain? with 19.01 million copies and in seventh place (after the inevitable Pokémon) More Brain Training: How old is your brain? capable of totaling 14.88 million. Of the 10 best-selling video games for that platform, three were for non-gamers.

The situation is accentuated for the Wii, whose best-selling title ever was Wii Sports with 82.90 million copies (of course, it will be said that the figure is distorted by the fact that it was sold in a bundle with the console, but it is also true that many purchased the Wii for that title), followed not surprisingly in third place by Wii Sports Resort with 33.14 million while in fifth, sixth and seventh place were Wii Play (28.02 million), Wii Fit (22.67 million) and Wii Fit Plus (21.13 million). Wii Party closed the charts with 9.35 million copies sold. In short, of the 10 best-selling Wii video games, six were for non-gamers. Indeed, for those new players ensnared by Nintendo.

However, there is a theme: the audience of neophytes must be educated and accompanied in the enjoyment of titles even more for hardcore gamers. As?

SONY PROJECTS INVOLVE AI

Sony does not seem willing, at least at the moment, to create ad hoc consoles for casuals or even a series for them, also because the financial situation requires it to reduce expenses and not increase them, which is why it has filed a patent that aims to exploit the 'AI, or artificial intelligence, to help casuals play traditional titles: it is a technology that analyzes the user's inputs on the controller, checks its effectiveness and provides suggestions. We don't know if even a sort of autopilot comes into play for the most desperate cases or the most difficult situations.

It should be remembered that the presence of patents does not automatically imply that Sony intends to make use of these technologies in the future: it is a move to protect its work which could then be sold or licensed to third parties or remain on the shelf. bottom of some drawer. Yet, if we take the example of Nintendo again, the Kyoto company was a master in this: crushed in the competition between PlayStation and Xbox, after the failure of its GameCube it managed to recover by avoiding direct competition with rivals and colonizing new prairies well before the advent of smartphones.

Analysts now agree that Sony must expand its margins to recover. Yet, he doesn't have many options ahead of him: either he will reduce the headcount of the gaming division, already hit by last year's cuts, or he will reduce the budget available for triple-A titles.

The room for maneuver is so limited that although PlayStation 5 is now at the turning point of its life, the Japanese software house will not be able to present the traditional price cut or it would further erode the amount of money that ends up in the cash register.

Microsoft seems to have opted for multiplatform, abandoning or almost abandoning the path of exclusives. Sony, on the other hand, could wink at those who don't yet play, thanks to titles in which it is essentially the AI ​​that has the pad in hand: more gamers equal more consoles sold and a consequent improvement in the accounts. Or at least that's the hope.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/cosi-sony-prova-a-giochicchiare-con-lia-per-vendere-piu-playstation/ on Fri, 23 Feb 2024 06:37:15 +0000.