Slightly misleading/incorrect title. They require payment only if PS gets less than 85% of the cross-platform revenue. Not defending them by any means, it's absolutely a scummy practice. I wonder if that's part of the reason that PS/PC isn't being merged with Xbox/Switch at the moment. I don't have numbers of course so what I'm about to say is all speculation. Looking in game, it feels like there is a much bigger population of PS players on DCUO than there are PC players, so it's possible that at the moment it works out fine for the devs if 85%+ of the revenue is generated on PS, meaning DI doesn't have to pay any additional revenue. If Xbox and Switch were brought into the mix that could potentially have a huge impact on DI's profit if they end up having to pay a big chunk of it to Sony every month.
I don’t think this means 85% of the revenue has to be PS4. It says (PS4 revenue share)/(PS4 gameplay share) has to be 0.85 or greater. That means if the PS4 people are pulling their weight it’s all good, that is if PS4 is 30% of the population and they contribute 30% of the revenue, thats a ratio of 1.0 which is greater than 0.85, so no royalty. Only if they are underperforming by more than 15% do you have a royalty. Say they only contribute 15% of the revenue, which would be a 0.5 ratio. Then there would be a royalty using their stated formula.
My apologies, I was reading it incorrectly above. I was mainly looking at the PSN revenue portion. That'll teach me to read things more carefully.
In some ways, I understand this since it's a perceived loss of income. If 95% of the players on a cross play game are on your platform, you would "expect" 95% of the revenue for the game to go through your services as well. The slide shows that they are only asking for compensation if less than ~80% of the revenue goes through their services with 95% of the players being on there platform. I also wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft and Nintendo have similar requirements. There are definitely nuances that are lost in a slide like this, such as the platform restricted aspects of DCUO. Also, the ratio of paying (membership and marketplace purchase) verses non paying (ftp or premium not currently spending money) players on different platforms can vary greatly. But that is at least attempted to be covered by lowering the threshold. It would be better if it was percentage on paying players instead of percentage of all players. It's possible that the platform restrictions fulfill these requirements, in a roundabout way. Essentially, the money spent on a platform can only be "used" by people on that platform, so there isn't a potential for "lost" income due to someone on one platform buying something and giving it to someone on a different platform. Though, there may be some gaps in the current platform restrictions.
