The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West cost Sony over $200m to develop each

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

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