Redaction errors reveal the economics of exclusivity | Opinion

Horizon: Forbidden West has sold about 8.4 million copies, and The Last of Us Part 2 has shifted over 10 million. For Sony, both of these games are profitable – but “for Sony” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For any other publisher, turning a profit from these games would have been a lot harder, because the economics of being a platform ho... See more

Sony earns a cut of the sales of third-party games on PlayStation, which of course it gets to keep with first-party games – meaning that its own games can justify very large budgets more easily, as they generate more revenue per unit sold. A further justification for taking this kind of risk on high development costs is that the games themselves se... See more

By becoming a PlayStation exclusive, FFXVI more or less ends up having the economic advantages of a first-party title. Sony has most likely waived most, if not all, of its platform fee for the game, so every unit sold is more profitable for Square Enix; it has also almost certainly absorbed some of the marketing costs for the game by rolling it int... See more

The economics of a platform holder building games for its own hardware are just different, and the end result is that Sony is one of a very small number of companies that can afford to spend these kinds of budgets on development while still sticking to a relatively old-fashioned pay-to-play business model. Neither game features any kind of battle p... See more