Your guarantee is about as good as saying that the New York Rangers would win the Super Bowl as often as the Kansas City Chiefs, if only they had a similarily good head coach and quarterback combo. It is that nonsensical.

A decade ago Nintendo posted losses and they didn't lay off any of their developers. Do you understand? We have historic evidence that Nintendo doesn't and won't do what you claim is a guarantee.

Overall console growth may have stagnated over the last decade, but so have hardware prices, especially for PS hardware.
I wonder how many more consoles would get sold overall this gen if SNY and/or MS went back to subsidizing the hardware? Like starting now, since both have seen a slump in sales and both should have plenty of production capacity by this point. Lower prices from the start of this gen wouldn't have mattered due to the shortages early on.
SNY has got to be making money on every unit by now even with inflation. Imagine them taking $100 hit to that, leading to a $349-$399 PS5 right now, and imagine the prices kept falling slowly like they used to as the gen went on.

I don't think the overall combined console sales have necessarily stagnated due to merely a lack of interest, but also due to the higher entry pricing of the hardware throughout the gen. There's a reason why the XBSS sells so much better than the XBSX. The more expensive a console is, the more appealing a cheaper option, like mobile becomes.

Are overall combined console sales stagnant because potential customers are simply not interested at all, or is it because the gaming companies are actually making higher profits by selling the same amount of stuff for more?

Don't bet on it.

NAND has been increasing in price... We are looking at upwards of 10-20% just for the Q2 of 2024... And that's mostly because of reduced manufacturing since 2021 to make up for a slump.

https://www.trendforce.com/news/2024/04/09/news-ssd-prices-keep-rising/


DRAM is increasing by about 10-15% as well just for Q1 2024:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/pc-dram-prices-projected-to-rise-10-to-15-in-q1-2024

TSMC increased fabrication costs by 8.7% on top of it:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4676101-taiwan-semiconductor-tsmc-raising-prices-8-7-percent-in-2024-as-revenue-growth-underperforms-customers

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We are at an interesting point in manufacturing where the core components in the consoles have all been increasing in costs, not decreasing.

Sony has already done the best it can in reducing costs, but that only gets you so far... For example they reduced the number of NAND chips in the Slim from 6 chips down to 4... But that benefit gets completely undermined with rising NAND chip costs.

They reduced the SoC size, but again... TSMC raised prices.

In order for a PROPER cost reduction of the Playstation 5, Sony needs to port it's chip to 5nm or 3nm TSMC, but that is still at a cost premium, that premium will go away once Apple and nVidia stop gobbling up every single wafer that TSMC spews out.

Capitalism exist at ever level in gaming and collecting in general, from big investors to flippers.

Whether it is a driver to cut corners to save costs which result in a substandard product, which results in people not buying it to flippers using bots to buy up products at launch to rip of gamers or collectors.

The only way such things self correct is if the consumer has the will power to not support such practices. If you feed the monster cash that is does not deserve, it breads other monsters into the mix who want some of that cash. These monsters don't care about the consumer's happiness and long term grown, only looking to make a quick buck, then when this lot of consumers are fed up and decreased, they move onto the next target like locus.

What if it was the merger that allowed these companies to dish out one more game before they closed? Bethesda was bleeding before MS brought them, and could have planned to close those studios a lot sooner. It's easy to point fingers at the big guy when none of you know the finical situation of the studios under these umbrellas. I talk from experience within a corporation. I have seen it personally with my own eyes and savings in the bank account is not an option to save brands that aren't turning a profit. 

Instead of blaming MS, what about the founder Shinji Mikami who walked out from Tango? 

“I was very close to a rank and file employee”: Shinji Mikami Reveals the Real Reason Why He Quit Tango Gameworks Even After Resident Evil’s Success - IMDb

As mentioned before, Sony closed down London and layed off 900 employees for being successful, GamePass and Mergers had nothing to do with it. Its as simple as companies can have high upkeeps and sometimes the only way to save other studios of closing is to close those that aren't returning on investment. 

You can assume the merger was the reason, much like you can assume it wasn't. Closures have been happening very frequently and also have been part of the industry since the beginning. And as I said before, Maybe it was the merger that allowed Tango to make HiFi and Arkan to make Redfall and they both failed.

Did i want MS to close studios? No, but i understand why it happened. No one got richer closing them, it was collateral damage to stop some of the internal bleeding. Its obvious. 

There's a lot overthinking in here.

Head count in the industry massively expanded over the last several years. While we've seen a lot of news of layoffs in the last 18 months or so, I don't think the industry is substantially smaller (by head count) than it was pre-covid. It's a pretty normal cycle. Things are good, companies hire a lot. Things slow down, companies fire a lot.

If you don't want to see cycles of heavy layoffs, you'd have to give up those hiring cycles that come before them. And that's no good for anyone. Companies took a lot of risk by adding headcount and acquiring studios. Some of that risk paid off, some of it did not. And the stuff that has not paid off has to be cut to make room for future investments.  I've seen no evidence that any of these companies have done anything wrong. It's all normal, and (arguably) healthy.  

With that said, we can certainly feel bad for workers that have lost their jobs. On an individual level, loss of a job is often a very big deal.  

Nobody could have seen that coming.

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/460970/square-enix-to-lay-off-staff-in-the-us-and-europe/

But they didn't lay off any of their Japanese developers - guess Takashi Kiryu must have that Iwatan soul in him, right?