PlayStation Investing $183 Million Into Exclusives Over The Next Year

PlayStation 5 will see some seriously exciting exclusives over the course of the next fiscal year as Sony intends to invest piles and piles of money into its first-party studios and other creative partners.

To bring you up to speed, the stats shared in the company's fiscal year results for 2020 are staggering. PlayStation generated over $25 billion in revenue, accounting for 30% of Sony's total revenue across the twelve month period. Furthermore, the PlayStation 4 has broken the record for the highest number of games sold for a single console ever, with nearly 1.6 billion sales in eight years. Not to be outdone, eight million units of the PlayStation 5 have been sold since launch, which has outperformed the equivalent numbers for the PlayStation 4 in the equivalent window of time. While supporting its old hardware is still a focus for Sony, "as time passes, [we are] going to see more and more emphasis on PS5 development," according to Jim Ryan, CEO of PlayStation. There are adorable homages to past exclusives in Astro's Playroom (installed on every PlayStation 5) so see if you spotted them all in your playthrough.

Returning to the topic at hand, VGC reported that Sony spoke about its ambitions for the exclusive software that we will look forward to in a conference call last week. "We intend to increase development personnel and other in-house costs by approximately 20bn yen [$184m] year-on-year, as we further strengthen our in-house software," said chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki. "To enhance our software offering, we intend to continue investing in partnering with external studios, in addition to aggressively investing in our in-house studios. As I just mentioned, we aim to strengthen the PlayStation platform through actions such as the recently announced partnership with Haven Entertainment, which was established by Jade Raymond, creator of the famous game Assassin's Creed."

"In our additional investment of Epic Games, along with the rest of the Sony group we will also work to enhance the social and platform capabilities of games." Well, Ewan's got his own thoughts on Returnal, a sci-fi roguelike exclusive to the PlayStation 5 where the protagonist has crashed on a terrifying alien planet repeating the events over and over in a time loop. If that sounds complex, that's because it is, and beautifully so. "Dashing through enemy hordes and evading hails of projectiles while returning fire at a constant silky-smooth 60fps is as thrilling the first time as it is the hundredth," explained Ewan. So, if we're getting more of this to come from the studios that have carefully cultivated creative partnerships with Sony, then count us in.