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The story
A thread titled “How can Sony turn things around from here” appeared on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board. Right at the top, someone noted that “the most recent earnings report showed record-high sales and profit,” and yet post after post voiced alarm that Sony is somehow in dire enough straits to need a “comeback” in the first place. Opinions split over the outlook for the PlayStation business, the heavy tilt toward Western-made games, and the lack of original IP, with a good number of posters also worried about a high-profit structure that’s really just propped up by cost-cutting.
What people said
I just want them to go bankrupt.
what exactly would a "comeback" even look like from here?
By the way, why are they making so much money in the first place?
everything else can just be sold off piecemeal
PS1 → the Super Famicom/FF generation, the Cambrian explosion of casual games, and the era when perfect arcade ports really took off
PS2 → the DVD-playback feature, plus everyone carrying over from the PS1
The little-known trick for dodging the original PS1's "Sony timer" (the urban legend that Sony gear is built to break right after the warranty runs out)
the foundation underneath is rotten
that's already what's happening in practice, so all that's left is to make the call official
This is probably the only path left.
They have no choice but to sell it as "play mobile gacha games on a big TV screen instead of a tiny phone screen."
That could mean making PS-exclusive gacha titles, or getting Chinese studios to churn out cash-grab action games with the pitch "control cute anime girls on the big screen!" — I bet the target crowd would bite instantly (the original oddly says "barriers," likely slang for the intended audience).
Anyway, either way, they've been pushed into a corner where just having third parties make software like before no longer cuts it
No — if they throw away even the nominal pretense of being a home console, that would actually finish them off.
If being a giant smartphone is fine, then physical discs aren't needed either, and that's exactly why they're trying to ditch them.
But do that, and retailers will drop them too.
With smartphones, companies don't need retailers because they run their own app stores, but there's no way PlayStation could build a store like that from scratch at this point.
The more you think about how they could survive, the more it just proves they're already checkmated.
Ghost of Yotei is basically just DLC, but the moment they started bragging about it like it's a "complete edition," the whole thing was doomed to flop
It goes download-only, the hardware disappears from store shelves, and its whole presence just quietly fades away.
No need to even make some big withdrawal announcement — it's win-win all around
That's the most Sony move possible.
If they hand out a free app as a "service" on phones, they get to claim it's reached more people than the PS5 and keep their pride intact
They're posting record profits, right?
That'd win it for them.
So just go buy Microsoft, yeah?
Problem solved. That's all.
If memory gets another 10x bump, the Switch 2 is finished too
which means the "everybody dies" theory comes true
and build a character and flagship title that screams "this is Sony" the second you see it
I think Toro (Toro Inoue, Sony's mascot cat) is fairly well known to the general public
but if you told me Toro was starring in an action game or a racing game, that just wouldn't feel right
So there's at least a little chance, then?
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The claim of “record-high profits” that comes up often in threads like this appears to refer to either Sony Group’s overall earnings or those of its Game & Network Services segment specifically, but since no source is cited anywhere in the thread, these posts shouldn’t be taken at face value without caution. Where opinions diverged was over how to read those strong numbers: skeptics saw them as “surface-level strength” propped up by cost-cutting and hits from Chinese mobile gacha games, while others read them as a genuine sign of underlying business health. The worries about a lack of original IP and dependence on third parties echo a real industry-wide shift — in recent years the PlayStation business has leaned more on live-service titles and partnerships with outside publishers rather than major in-house new releases — so this isn’t just idle griping. That said, the thread also mixed in claims stated as flat fact with no backing, plus a few borderline conspiracy-theory posts; in writing this article, claims without any clear basis have been left out.
※This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Urgent] How Sony Can Turn Things Around From Here.”
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