Sony failed to properly censor material revealing information that was confidential to the world and to its competitors.
Sony will have a grudge against stationery. PlayStation parent company finds itself in trouble after failed black marker censorship reveals The Verge. As part of the trial between Microsoft and the FTC to judge the takeover of Activision Blizzard, the manufacturer shared an extremely confidential document. This included the cost of developing its own licenses, as well as the revenue generated by the franchise. call of duty.
This type of document is then made accessible to everyone, minus the secret information. If the general public can access the documents presented during hearings of this kind, they undergo a hell of a lot of editing work to remove the compromising data. But this time, the person in charge of this heavy task was content to pass a marker stroke. Once scanned, the paper reveals all its secrets despite the black ink affixed to certain passages.
An error that reveals the underside of the studios
The court took care of deleting the files as soon as possible, but it was already too late. Competitors and curious people had already taken care to download these evidences to keep a permanent trace of them. A hard blow for Sony and PlayStation, but a real boon for analysts who obtain fruitful data, to say the least.
Among the figures shared, we learn in particular that PlayStation’s AAA titles fetch over $200 million (212 million in the case ofHorizon Forbidden West and 220 million for The Last of Us Part II). The document also indicates the human resources mobilized for their development: around 300 employees for the title of Guerrilla Games and 200 for that of Naughty Dog.
The mastodon FPS
The statistics concerning call of duty however, remain the most significant. According to Sean Hollister’s analysis at The Vergeno less than 1 million players are just playing call of duty. Here is the approximate data slipped behind the marker strokes:
“In 2021, over (14?) million users (per device) spent 30% or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent over 70% of their time playing Call of Duty and approximately 1 million users spent 100% of their game time on Call of Duty. In 2021, Call of Duty players will spend an average of (116?) hours per year playing Call of Duty. Call of Duty players who spend more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty spend an average of 296 hours on the franchise.”
These loyal players then brought in $ 800 million to Sony in 2021, and this in the American market alone. As for the overall market, call of duty would have brought in around $1.5 billion, and $15.9 billion including subscriptions, accessories, and other gaming-related expenses. The difficulty in reading the document makes it impossible to verify the accuracy of the data, but nevertheless reveals the consequent impact of the franchise for the manufacturer. Sony’s fears about the future of call of duty are therefore not unjustified.
