Do Astro Bot’s Sales Spell Doom or Gloom?

Sony has released their quarterly financial results, and like always we can gleam some interesting information out of them. For instance, we’ve finally got sales numbers for Astro Bot- 1.5 million copies sold in about three months. Even more fascinating, apparently 37% of buyers hadn’t bought a first-party Sony game in the last two years.

The sales of Astro Bot have been a point of speculation for a while now. That’s mostly because the game has seen nothing but praise from the likes of me and countless other people online. But unfortunately, praise does not equal money. And these publishers only speak one language at the end of the day- money.

For instance, the beloved Alan Wake 2 is only just now close to making its money back. Alan Wake 2 still hasn’t made a profit. It’s been on the market for over a year!

We know that Team Asobi (the developers behind Astro Bot) had roughly 60-65 people working on this game. And because game development is cheaper in Japan than in other places around the world, we can only speculate about the budget. My personal guess would be between $50-$60 million. So if Astro Bot has brought in about $30 million in profit, should we breathe a sigh of relief? Did we prove to Sony that single-player is where many people want them?

It’s hard to say.

The higher-ups at Sony are probably having a lot of difficult conversations behind the scenes. After the historic flop of Concord, $30 million must seem like a drop in the bucket to them. Not to mention how they nearly fumbled the massive success of Helldivers 2 with the PC version almost requiring a PSN account post-launch. Sony has proved to me over the last few years that they don’t want to make this “chump change” anymore.

Sony wants Fortnite-like money.

While I’m sure Christmas will bring in enough extra sales to bring that profit up to say $50 million, is that even enough?

I’m sure after the major criticism for closing down Japan Studio, Sony has learned to keep its smaller, cheaper, and “artsier” studios alive for its public image. We can probably expect one of these mid-sized and fun-focused single player games once every few years. I only hope that Sony takes one lesson away from this:

Video games don’t need to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and have hundreds of people working on them. Sadly, I don’t expect Sony to learn this lesson. Make no mistake, this only confirms what Sony has been pursuing for the entire PS5 generation; multiplayer is where the money is at.

We can only wait and see how this plays out for the duration of the PlayStation 5 generation.