Sorry about the Wall of text. Somekind of site formatting error is keeping me from being able to just seperate the paragraphs normally. It's fixed now tho.

It does seem as tho they stumbled into this strategy at least in part by accident. They were ready to do battle in the MP space but after the SSM game bust and Killzone Shadow Fall not really pushing any number they saw a new opportunity. Since then they have doubled down on it. Interested to see if TLOU tries to implement MP again in any significant way or will it end up derailing like Uncharted 4's (I say this as a big fan of UC2's MP but it has since waned heavily).

Yep i agree. 

Regarding TLOU2, i am sure MP will be in it. The gamers who played TLOU will expect it and Naughty Dog will have learnt from UC4. I expect a considerably expanded MP offering for TLOU2  

I don't play MP titles, so i'm glad that they focus on a broad array of single player exclusives.

Alot of people that do well in bussiness will all tell you..... you dont make it big, by doing or following, what everyone else is doing.
If you see your competitor and tons of 3rd party, all start to focus on multiplayer centric games, it leaves a opening for other titles (that arnt multiple player focused).

Also Sony has always been about these Player driven Story focused games, its not a accident, its a choice imo.
Its their identity.

You are right that it was stigs game, but it was cancelled coz it was similar to Destiny and No man Sky, this has been reported by many insiders who left SSM when the layoff happened. Official Sony and SSM statement is that the game was cancelled because it was not meeting production goals, which according to one insider who also leaked games concept art meant that the games development started having problems when destiny was revealed. Sony felt the two games were too similar, and with destiny having far bigger budget, development team and hype sony feared that SM game would just end up getting buried. So they tried to have the dev team re-imagine the game to make it more distinct, but it would seem they weren't happy with the new approach or it wasn't progressing like it should so in the end they decided to cut their losses and refocus the resources onto God Of war reboot.

I’ve been thinking the same thing for a while. Sony has had success in multiplayer in the in past with games like Uncharted, TLoU, Killzone, Warhawk, SOCOM, and Resistance to an extent, but it’s pretty obvious that they’ve been so much more successful with games in general this gen because they’re not going out of their way to try and compete directly with their third party partners on the multiplayer front. They know that the majority of multiplayer gamers will choose multiplat games like Fortnite or CoD, so they can instead focus on quality single player experiences and sell to a different, but clearly still relevant, demographic.

That being said, I do hope that Sony does invest in at least one or two titles with a heavy multiplayer component this gen, besides TLoU2 and Death Stranding. I feel like their biggest problem last gen was they simply had too many MP titles. With their current great reputation and huge first party success, I think now is the time to invest heavily into a single multiplayer title, like another MAG, just to compliment their excellent single player library.

Very nice op! Tag and a bump. Hoping more people will give it a look.

You are right about it being Stig, not Cory. I will correct that in OP. I do distinctly remember reading that reasons were varied for it's cancellation. Not meeting goals but goal was to differentiate itself from Destiny and or other games(looking at leaked Concept Art that other game would be Horizon Zero Dawn). I can't seem to find any of the original articles with quotes from the ex developers who got layed off that mentioned it.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-02-17-art-allegedly-from-sony-santa-monicas-cancelled-sci-fi-ps4-ip-emerges

Looking at this concept art now tho has me really bummed they didn't release this game. I think I would be far more interested in this title than whatever Destiny is :(

What Sony has done is identified their strength, Single Player Story Driven gaming, and doubled down on it in a climate that wasn't concentrating on that even tho the fanbase still wants it. Meanwhile they have identified their weakness, MP gaming, and have wisely utilized their market pull to get the biggest MP game developers aligned with them.

PS4 must have like 60%+ market share at least of all Multiplat multiplayer games sold. Games that sell 5-20 million on their console alone. Sony will make royalties from that but also the money from these games excessive Microtransactions. 

Now that I am thinking about it, it would be usueful to pull the actual numbers of these game's sales on PS4 vs their own personal outings.