Sony PlayStation Increases This Year’s Gaming Research and Development Budget to $2.1 Billion

Sony has been pumping out some of the biggest titles year in, year out, and one of the main contributing factors is all the money the company puts in toward the research and development of gaming. It has recently been revealed that Sony has upped its research and development budget for games significantly this year, focusing towards its plans of increasing their live-service portfolio and entering the metaverse too.

As reported by Nikkei, Sony Group has increased its budget for research and development budget to 300 billion yen, which amounts to around $2.13 billion. This is a fair increase from last year’s 271.1 billion yen. This increase in Sony’s budget will work towards its plan of increasing the live-service portfolio, as the company believes that the market value for these titles will be around $19 billion by 2026.

Through the new budget, Sony will want to increase its live-service portfolio, aligning with its plans of having 12 live-service titles under its belt by 2026. At the moment, Sony has only one, and that is Bungie’s Destiny 2. The other focus on Sony’s mind is entering the metaverse through research and development in extended reality.

As devices such as the Apple Vision Pro have been announced, Sony will be looking to bolster its hold in this category too. Therefore, it will be bringing in all the nine studios under its umbrella to help towards the research and development for extended reality. Another area that Sony plans to allocate this budget towards is in-vehicle content, which will focus on the CES 2023 announcement of its partnership with Honda to bring the PS5 to EV Afeela.