they don't need to make dirt cheap indie games. But like $350 million for Spiderman, $250 million for Marathon, this is not sustainable.
As long as most of them keep being profitable (very likely the case of these two games) it's sustainable. The thing is that for all publishers, since the 8's a portion of their games get canned or tank in sales, so the profit of the successful games have to compensate the failed ones.
Thanks to the GaaS+PC push PS Studios is more than fine for now. But the thing is, what will happen next gen if as in previous generations AAA budgets almost double?
Sure, to also publish smaller indies or shorter AA/small AAA games adds variety to the catalog and fills roadmap holes between longer and bigger developments, plus are less risky. But they also generate way less revenue, so despite many of them may provide some small profit may not be enough to fund the bigger ones.
It's also worth mentioning that looking at Mobygames, GoW Sons of Sparta took some years to be made has 1,356 workers on its game credits, which is in the 1,100-1,600 ballpart of projects like Gran Turismo 7 (1,310), Demon Souls remake (1,389), Returnal (1,176), Stellar Blade (1,155), Ratchet Rift Apart (1,598), Destruction AllStar (1,255), Horizon CoM (1,353), Sackboy A Big Adventure (1,499), Lego Horizon (1,081), Rise of the Ronin (1,565). Projects that I very likely had higher salaries and longer development times than GoWR Sons of Sparta, but had a not that different manpower size.
Then thre's another group of 1900-2800 ballpart of Ghost of Yotei (1,946), Miles Morales (1,945), Concord (1,972),and GoWR (2,602) or Marathon (2,752) are a bit above this.
Then in the extremes there's Spider-Man 2 (3,575), Death Stranding 2 (3,117) or Horizon Forbidden West (3,365) in another level, almost AAAA territory. Plus in the opposite side of the spectrum there's Astro Bot (514).
I don't even see where the money went. It doesn't have a ton of content, it's a shooter, the production values aren't even that high.
If you play the game you'll see it has a huge amount of content, also including proper narrative/story like in a SP campaign game.
