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Sony is investing $2.1B in gaming R&D, focusing on live service.
(insider-gaming.com)
In a report published by Nikkei, it was revealed that Sony intends to ‘pour’ financial resources into gaming research and development – to the tune of around $2.13 billion. That’s reportedly an investment that’s being made before the end of fiscal year 2024, and it’ll account for a whopping 40% of Sony’s entire R&D spending.
Sony plans to allocate a staggering 60% of all PlayStation 5 development spending to live service games exclusively for the year ending March 2026. It was also stated that there’s a grand goal in place to have no fewer than twelve live service games in the PlayStation portfolio within that same timeline.
Exciting times for everyone in Live Ops I'm sure 😉
None of those require R&D.
R&D in this case would be prototyping, testing network infrastructure, etc. Seeing what type of live service game they think the market will react well to.
That's not R&D though, that's market research and system/network engineering/architecture. R&D is specifically for blue-sky inventing, not so much iterating.
It's market research and game development. I don't think Sony has existing live service games to iterate on, so they're making something new. A lot of new somethings.