Sony has disclosed in its latest quarterly financial conference call that the company will be looking into ways to “appropriately” explore microtransactions in the future. Sony has made mention that the PlayStation Store is its ongoing revenue stream and that it looks to expand with microtransactions.
You’ve read right, Sony has expressed in its latest quarterly financial conference call for investors that it will explore microtransactions. If you don’t believe this information, the disclosure of said news can be found over on sony.net/SonyInfo.
Sony went on to explain how important the PlayStation Store is to its ongoing revenue, which is said to contribute to more than half of sales for the company’s network services in the current fiscal year. In other words, half of the revenue will be coming from the console’s online network.
Furthermore, it is said that as a result of this, Sony wants to keep the PlayStation Plus subscription rate quite high and make it more “compelling” for users who already have the service active.
We also learn that there will not be a big hardware priority as maintaining a healthy amount of monthly active users, since Sony believes a shift has taken the games industry by storm. The company now believes that the industry has skewed from a royalty-based convention to making direct sales to consumers.
Looking further into the IR News, it is said that a lot of these direct sales come in the form of letting folks purchase virtual items and other content in-game. The amount of revenue generated from these microtransactions is only profitable, according to the executives over at Sony.
The thing is, the company may or may not go through with this move. But, it is worth noting that there is a lot of people who support and want microtransactions.
You say you don’t believe me? I come across a lot of people who support microtransactions on a daily basis that the indie dev team over a game called Aftershock was encouraged to add it in by a certain user named Zero5_Kev:
“hi dev. could you please reply…
will this game have microtransactions / cosmetics. to enable players to change cloths.
so the community can buy and sell item of cloths on the community market. like on playerunknowns aka pubg. because the pics looks amazing. and would be nice to buy and sell cloths on the community market. and for early access buyers should get items of cloths for joining.. again like on PUBG. you will gaine more players this way because the cloths on pubg are selling about £800 + on the early cloths. weekly case drops for every 1 will be a must. or earning ingame credit to pay for boxes. like again on PUBG. its why there is over 2million players on it.”
Let me get something straight, PUBG, a new game that’s not a year old, has new items selling for £800 ($1060)? And people are buying them? You want to know the indie devs response to the above? It was “no”.
As much as I am against microtransactions we will not see them leave the games industry anytime soon, unless we collectively take a stand against them.
