With what money?

Great move on Sony's part.  The last few Ratchet and Clank games were pretty awful.  No idea how any of the Resistance games are, but Fuse got a low metacritic score.

RAD prefers to stay private. I don't think money is the question, they just don't want to sell.

I'd see that as Sony dodging a bullet then a missed opportunity, given Insomniacs painful decent into mediocrity over the past decade. They're a large studio too.

It would be better for Sony to focus on smaller, very talented teams. We'll see how The Order turns out, but RAD fit the bill in terms of studios Sony like to pick up.

Ratchet Nexus was really quite good, but I think they just had a certain contract fullfillment. The "future series" which was the first 3 upto "a Crack in Time" was brilliant, but then they did a series of average non-traditional Ratchet games. Nexus was a return to the original style, but didn't really offer anything new

The Resistance games were good, but Fuse was the big problem. The other thing to consider is that not many of those games were really commercially succesful, they had to look elsewhere and it didn't really work

Is there a problem with that? Those companies worked close with Sony and agreed to become an official member of the Playstation family when the opportunity was given to them.

And pretty much all of Sony's IPs are and were "good". Unless you are talking about all of them not selling 10 milliin each or something

While I agree that Insomniac is certainly declining (while ND show their true quality), Sony isn't really buying that small studios. In fact, they're expanding all their internal studios. ND has gone 2 teams, Guerllia is pretty big, SCE Santa Monica is pretty large too. Sucker Punch is quite small, but expanding rapidly.

If anything, Sony are trying to get a smaller portpholio of larger studios

This doesn't make much sense. If a company working close with Sony wants to stay independent, then they will stay independent( ThatGameCompany and Insomniac for example). A company just can't jump up and acquire a studio if they express that they want to work on other platforms.

They can't be like "oh no, bitch! You aren't going ANYWHERE!"

Ready at Dawn is always very interested in Sony, they will be like Second party for some time and Sony will get them as soon as they get better financially.

the port of Okami for the Wii soon? or the next time :P