- Joined
- Oct 28, 2017
Japan wanted to move the headquarters to America and then install people who would do the bidding for the main Japanese branch of Sony because Yoshida wants to have the company focus on it's own IPs and start being known for those. Sony (the Japanese parent company itself) has full control over the playstation brand like they've never had before. It's mirroring Nintendo when it was run by Yamuchi. Yoshida's whole mantra is about cost cutting and efficiency which was why he reformed Japan studio, after the kadokawa deal they already had about a dozen more companies added to their reserves who also made games and the people who left Japan studio made their own studios who are now considered external development. When he came into being the CEO in 2018 Sony was restructuring so they could effectively utilize all their branches as a single unit. They'd make their own hardware, they'd make their own media formats, they'd make their own music, and they'd make their own IPs to go along with them and have those be linked to games, TV and movies.
Except none of that actually happened. And it isn't happening. Nobody buys Sony hardware. Nobody buys their phones, or audio equipment. Samsung is eating their lunch in the tv market, and that market is contracting quickly as more people watch TV on the computers, phones, iPads and the like, with the corona virus making even mighty Samsung cautious. The camera industry, the one consumer electronics industry they actually do well in, is withering away, a years long ongoing trend, with 2019, the year before the pandemic, being the worst year on record for the industry. That year, Sony were the only one of the Japanese companies to even post a profit in the sector, and that was largely due to the fact that Sony had a dominant position in the Smartphone image sensor market, not because they sold more cameras. The very next year, Sony still came in second to Canon when it came to actual camera sales. Its only because Sony does well in mirrorless sales that they do any business there at all. Sony's plan to integrate their hardware with their other businesses is dead in the water because their hardware doesn't sell. No wonder they spun off all their consumer electronics businesses into a separate subsidiary.
As for media formats, the media format wars are over. Sony introduced the winner of the last major format war in the Blu-ray, but it hardly mattered. By then, digital was king, and nobody was buying disks.
Their music business is highly susceptible to piracy, and they don't have their own market like iTunes to dominate that segment.
Their film business was a money pit for almost its entire existence. It only started doing well in recent years thanks to that Jumanji movie (which was better than it had any right to be) and Enter the Spiderverse, but it still can't really compete on a level playing field with the likes of Disney or Warner Bros., not even getting into the havoc the pandemic has played on the industry.
Sony's one success is in video games, where they dominated this past generation, but are now getting the destroyed by the Switch, while the pandemic slows their production.
The Japanese developers don't give a rats ass about censorship since they want full on access to China and other larger markets over anything else, where Sony is already more established than it's competition.
Market penetration of video games into the Chinese market is still limited and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The only games doing well their are free play phone games and the like. Japanese companies almost certainly do care about censorship, because they know that the American and Japanese audiences don't like it, hence why many go out of their way make Switch versions and openly market them as uncensored.
Not sure what deal your talking about. Also Falcom is an independent developer who are also releasing all their newest games on both PC and Switch. As far as I know, they get no special backing from Sony, and are willing to follow the money and go to Switch and PC, so clearly they aren't showing favoritism to Sony.The Kadokawa deal is pretty major and companies like Falcom have already immediately benefitted from it. Sony is still backing the development of Falcom's games and they're also funding the Legend of Heroes anime series itself.
I never said that the info I quoted was new. I specifically pointed out that it looked at a specific historical period (Sony from 2002 to 2012), so your statement is completely pointless. Also, nothing in that article is inaccurate as far as factual information goes. All of it, from the quotes from the executives to the financial information is verifiable, and none of it has anything to do with what ever bullshit Yoshida has shoved up the investors (and yours, apparently) asses.The stuff you're quoting is years old and it's not all that accurate, especially since their latest shareholders meeting had Yoshida tell what the future plans are going to be.
And here you are basically proving the article's point, and my point exactly.The Japanese branches of playstation fucked up a ton of things in the past which was why the American division took over after PS3 launched bombed.
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