Revenue, concurrent, and active players are key metrics for gauging popularity. Profitability is a metric for gauging success. Popularity is not meaningless.

Playstation is a massive business. It dominates in dollar sales, software sales, f2p, and even services (where only GamePass competes). The fact that Playstation continues to sell 300 million traditional software annually and make the equivalent of that from microtransactions is actually insane. This is before counting "free game downloads" through Playstation Plus which constitutes 14% of total revenue (or around $4.4 billion).

Unlike GamePass, the money Sony makes through Playstation Plus Isn't damaging their traditional software model. Software sales and f2p remain absolutely huge on Playstation.

2% Extra software revenue or 10% less PS5 owners? Sony and MS kill their own consoles by releasing on PC. At the end of the day console owners are way more profitable than selling a handful of extra units on PC. 

Revenue gauges popularity how? Whales can easily support an unpopular game. Concurrent and active player measurments often fail to consider the people who bought the game and put it into their backlog. It also assumes that someone who finished the game isn't a customer and overlooks them. Revenue and concurrent players are meaningless metrics because both lack key data that is needed for a big picture. Without production and dev costs revenue is meaningless. Without sales figures concurrent players is meaningless. 

Except we do have enough data for unit sales and development costs. A slight increase in revenue easily deletes the rising development costs, I wrote a couple of detailed breakdowns on how dev cost vs revenue works and you seemed to agree.

A PS5 that sells a 100 million units at $500 is decidedly more popular than a PS5 that sells the same at $400. Because the extra $100 is prohibitive to a large segment of buyers. Similarly, Nintendo's games holding their prices is 100% an indicator of popularity, and is in no way "inflating revenue". Expensive consoles do not guarantee higher overall hardware revenues unless the consumer sees the value and decides to buy. PS5 selling so well at such high prices is objectively an indicator of popularity. Profitability is another story because it takes into account a crap ton of other factors, but Sony is beating their profit records as well and is stating to see huge year over year increases now that acquisitions (and Concord!) are behind them. Sony already made more profit this generation than what they made in the four previous generations combined. So the higher revenues are definitely netting them more money.

Only a compete fool would look at hardware sales alone without considering other factors. I loved my PS2, but the Playstation business today is much bigger and more successful (they're products of different eras. PS2 is indeed more impressive with its era in mind). And expensive products don't necessarily lead to higher revenues.

That is absolute nonsense.

Console games come to PC whether console manufacturers like it or not. It's called Emulation. - Better to profit on potential interested PC gamers than to alienate them, we will get the games either way.

PC is a much larger market than Playstation... And if Sony's PC ports weren't questionable in terms of features and quality, they may even sell better.

Any profit from potentially interested PC gamers is offset by the loss in console sales and subsequently the loss in 3rd party software sales royalties. 

Whether a game eventually comes to PC or not is irrelevant. If porting games to PC loses 10% lifetime console sales and 10% lifetime console based software revenue then porting to PC is like burning money. 

With Xbox in the dumpster at sub 40 million there should be 90 million PS5 customers already. Instead those customers left the console market for PC because Sony is doing everything they can to push them to PC. 

No price cuts. 

Porting exclusives to PC. 

Raising prices on consoles. 

Chasing GaaS instead of focusing on 1st party single player games. 

Any profit from potentially interested PC gamers is offset by the loss in console sales and subsequently the loss in 3rd party software sales royalties. 

Whether a game eventually comes to PC or not is irrelevant. If porting games to PC loses 10% lifetime console sales and 10% lifetime console based software revenue then porting to PC is like burning money. 

With Xbox in the dumpster at sub 40 million there should be 90 million PS5 customers already. Instead those customers left the console market for PC because Sony is doing everything they can to push them to PC. 

No price cuts. 

Porting exclusives to PC. 

Raising prices on consoles. 

Chasing GaaS instead of focusing on 1st party single player games. 

You claim to know better than Sony's business executives? Don't you think they have considered PC porting long and hard over the years and crunched the numbers?

I mean there might be a world where you turn out to be right and Sony is grossly underestimating the importance of exclusivity, but they also might have data that shows otherwise.