Sony Invests $300 Million Into More Of What Fans Love

Regardless of if you’re a PlayStation, Xbox or Switch kind of person (or all the above, in this house we don’t encourage console wars), there’s no denying that Sony have some excellent first-party releases. This year alone, we’ve already seen the release of Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo 7 (although the latter definitely had a questionable launch, thanks to its heavy inclusion of microtransactions).

Well, apparently Sony thinks that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, because as revealed in their latest earnings call, they’re going to be making a very chunky investment into their existing first-party studios. As reported by IGN, they’re planning on putting a whopping $300 million into the likes of Guerrilla Games and Santa Monica Studio, as part of a “two-pronged” strategy to grow the business.

While you're here, be sure to take a look at this incredible cut line from God of War - we can't believe that it got removed.

“We plan to increase software development expenses aimed at strengthening first-party software at our existing studios by approximately ¥40 billion [$308 million],” they said. 

So, how about the second part of the plan? Well, for most of you reading this, that’s probably the most exciting part: “Going forward we aim to grow the game business by strengthening our first-party software and deploying that software on multiple platforms,” they continued.

While “multiple platforms” could be referring to joint releases of games on both PS5 and PS4, it could also mean more PC ports of games that were originally PlayStation exclusives. Earlier this year, God of War released on Steam and went down incredibly well, so it’d really be no surprise if Sony decided that they want to go down that route more regularly. 

Although the $300 million investment sounds pretty extreme, it’s not really anything new - they clarified in the call that they’ve been increasing the amount of money they’ve been putting into their existing studios for a while now: “In addition to acquiring studios such as Bungie and Haven in recent years we have significantly increased our investment in content development in our existing studios. As a result our first-party software development has increased at a high rate,” they added.

Anyway, all you really need to know is that if you like Sony’s first-party games, you’re in luck - it seems that we can expect to get a whole lot more of them, and they’ll hopefully be better than ever.