Sony is raising its PlayStation budget to fuel more live service game development

It looks like Sony is planning to ramp up its investment in PlayStation over the next year. Sony has been ramping up PlayStation's R&D budget in recent years. For the current fiscal year, the budget is increasing by 40 percent to help fuel the development of more live service games. 

According to Nikkei, Sony is allocating a little over $2 billion to PlayStation's R&D segment. This makes it the most expensive R&D effort at Sony, surpassing electronics and even semiconductors.

For a bit of background, Sony allocated roughly $1 billion for PlayStation R&D spending in 2020, so the number has doubled in just the last couple of years.

It is reported that this increased R&D will enable Sony to develop more live service games, with the goal of generating consistent recurring income from online games and reducing the business's reliance on console sales.

KitGuru Says: If the last State of Play didn't make things clear enough, Sony's biggest focus right now is on multiplayer, service-style games, rather than new AAA single-player blockbusters, which are the types of games that garnered PlayStation so much success during the PS4 era. Time will tell if this bet pays off. 

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