But you do know the options for 3rd party at that time were limited.
In the PS1 era, they had Sega Saturn (a dead platform) and N64 (with its high costs thanks to cartridge). It was easy to jump on Sony wagon, even more when they were the only who really cared about 3rd party.
These are extremely limited simplifications and not exactly true in terms of being absolutes for the entire gen. Saturn was an actual competitor in Japan from 1994 to 1997, and the N64 was very strong in Western territories, at times outselling PS1 in them and that is well past the launch of the system there, too.
Phrasing it as if Sony were the only one who "really cared about 3P" is a nice way of wording they were the only one with the money, distribution channel pipelines and marketing infrastructure to use as bullet points to prospective 3P devs/pubs to lure their talent over to their platform (and later, lock in exclusivity deals with pubs like Eidos, Capcom, Konami, etc.). Don't get it twisted: these were 100% business-focused moves where Sony leveraged money and resources that Sega & Nintendo simply didn't have.
In the PS2 era, Sony continued to be the best option for partnership but this didn't stop MS and Nintendo to get some nice deals with 3rd party. That's what competition really means.
It doesn't change the fact it was a form of consolidation: content consolidation. The particulars aren't important here, just the reality that such is what it was. They also took advantage of some situations early on to drive away support from Dreamcast to PS2; several 3P devs with projects planned for Dreamcast cancelled them in favor of PS2 and this was before it actually launched. Some of these were negotiated in the early days of that gen, well before a runaway effect had formed.
I didn't say there wasn't competition or "real" competition, just that there was content consolidation that gen which is 100% true, and therefore falls into the definition as a form of consolidation (the type people are now fearmongering about these days).
So, no. It is not the same thing.
It effectively is when considering market conditions and realities of the day, dynamics, and market size. Consolidation is consolidation, whether it be with games (regardless HOW that happens), dev acquisitions, pub acquisitions, etc. You're getting lost in semantics.
MS started a trend where they are locking devs and publishers to their ecosystem. Sony never did that before,
Uh, they have? Psygnosis was a multi-plat dev before Sony acquired them, but that went away after a few years. They practically secured Square (and Final Fantasy) away from Nintendo where they had been for a decade prior to PS1. That is a form of "locking" them down to their ecosystem. History flat-out shows you're wrong.
but they'll have to now cause they can lose some important partners if not.
That's always a possibility, and doesn't always revolve around acquisitions. Some of those partners could just run out of money and go out of business, or pivot to another industry altogether. It's happened before and will happen again, acquisitions be damned.
Sony always bought studios who previously did work on exclusives for them, in all the generations. They won't scale down 2nd and 3rd party exclusives side, the opposite: they are also pushing harder there too.
It isn't a defensive move, PS always did this of acquiring people who successfully worked for them for a long period.
That wasn't the case for Naughty Dog, or Psygnosis tho, who are two of their first acquisitions. Also, while calling their recent acquisitions "defensive" might be a bit much, they are at least in some form reactionary, or partially reactionary. You can notice it in the language they use when they make the announcements, and their recent language regards acquisitions in general.
And MS even with Bethesda is still way behind Sony, Sony's game division continues making way more revenue (and profit) than the MS one. Zenimax game sales were less than 3% (probably 2%) of PS4 game sales, which are growing.
3% out of a sea of 1600 million, though. Considering Sony's total are probably averaged at around 10% of that, and they have released way more games than Zenimax/Bethesda last gen as a whole (especially in terms of new games)...I'd say those are actually quite good percentages for Zenimax/Bethesda on the platform.
So Sony won't miss Zenimax and is making way more money than MS, so no defensive moves are needed.
As a corporation no, they aren't making more money than MS in fact the inverse of that is true but...what does that necessarily have to do with trying to justify an acquisition?
Interesting... She knew about the Wolverine reveal before it was officially announced.
So did David Jaffe. What were timestamps of that one tweet he posted talking about the event, where he later said it said "bub" i.e a Wolverine catchphrase? Also who is she and what's her track record?