Sony's own financial guidance for investors, as well as the head of Sony Pictures hinting at video game consolidation, disagrees with your assessment. Sony has been talking of expanding their in house development capability since 2019, and they consistently emphasize aggressive investment towards their first party in each of their quarterly reports throughout the year. The amount of acquisitions for Playstation in 2021 suggests Sony is ramping up their efforts to expand their internal teams. 

Sony is allocating 18.4B for their midrange plan, which is focused on their entertainment pillars, but if Playstation is getting a small chunk of that, the amount seems excessive. What exactly are Sony Music or Sony Pictures going to buy? MGM? A mobile publisher that will cost them close to 10B+? The majority of that (10B - 13B) will be going towards Playstation IMO.

Sony has been purchasing mostly support studios and porting houses, which is in line with my previous statement that they are prioritizing a smaller number of big projects on long development cycles. If they were making a ply at volume, the character of the studios they would be acquiring would be different: more housemarque, less bluepoint, nixxes, and firesprite 

I would also not underestimate just how expensive film and music acquisitions can be

Bluepoint & Firesprite are far from support studios. Based on job listings, Firesprite has over 250+ employees with multiple projects in the works, while Bluepoint have been doing complete remakes and are confirmed to be working on "original content." 

Music related acquisitions are not expensive at all, especially for a massive corporation like Sony, who acquired EMI back in 2018 for 3B+, which is a high end purchase in that industry. The only film/television related acquisition that would be a massive undertaking for Sony would be ViacomCBS & that is an unrealistic target for midterm acquisitions. Even the recent Sony Pictures/Zee Entertainment merger had a 1.6B+ investment & this is considered a major play for an emerging market like India. 

What Sony is saying, and what they are doing, point to Playstation getting a bulk of that 18.4B. 

Won`t dispute the "sony shouldn't dispute on the volume of studios" as that is opinion, but on the couldn't that is BS, Sony could very easily have 30 different studios with multiple team if that were their objective/strategy.

“Could”? Absolutely. “Very easily”? I’m not sure about that. From a long term perspective we still don’t even know if Microsoft can handle its 23 studios, even if the early returns look good. 

the risk/reward calculus is completely different for Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft as a whole company is at a point of revenue generation that they can have one of their divisions spend several billion dollars on a distressed asset like Bethesda and not really have to worry about if it doesn’t pan out. Microsoft made back the money it spent on Bethesda in pure profit in about a month. 

Sony would necessarily have to be much more deliberate with an acquisition of that size because the margin of acceptable losses is lower. 

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1172620/view/3119304318780059475


Tangentially related to what has been discussed in here, can we safely call Sea of Thieves a mega hit for Microsoft now? They just passed the 5 million unit sales mark on steam alone, and are well over 25 million players in total across all platforms. I feel like this game continually gets slept on for how large it is

Sure they could. And we have heard the MS infinite money talk since like 20 years ago and it never really translated in MS doing crazy stuff to buy market as the fanbase dream off. Just now they really started putting the money to buy these devs.

And not sure why you think that Sony increasing their dev count let's say from 20 to 30 is harder to manage than MS going from like 5 to 30.

Is buying Zenimax not “crazy stuff” anymore 

Nope. 6.5B on Zenimax makes much more sense than 2.5B on Mojang all those years back. It is a healthy studio, very big and with many valued IPs. It sure is a lot more than Sony paid on the studios it bought, but it isn't crazy nor impossible. And as showed to you Sony have committed to invest over 18B on growth both organic and inorganic and a lot of that money will likely go to the Playstation side (either directly to purchase studios or increase teams on what is already theirs, or indirectly like buying crunchyroll licenses or some media distributors to have access to IPs that can be made into games). MS may have a lot of money but they don't just throw away or burn it. If they made the purchase was because they thought (one can agree or not, and most likely be wrong on the analysis by not having all the data MS have access to and specialists for it) they would make the ROI attractive enough.

Seems like you live on the mid PS3 days of "Sony is doomed and will go bankrupt in the next 6 months". Let me give you a heads up, Sony is a healthy company now and a lot of it is because of Playstation so if increasing the number of studios (which they have been doing) is the best strategy for their growth it is what they will do.

Of course it is crazy, but it doesn’t fit the narrative. Look at how you’re logically pointing out the differences in revenue and profit and it’s blown off as some console warz argument, even though you clearly weren’t using it so.