If people dont feel compelled to upgrade due to PC and PS4 ports, their revenues will suffer.
Bulshit. Their revenues are the big ones any console platform holder ever had. And aren't bigger because even if they are selling at gaming history records their consoles get sold out in minutes so a lot of people who wants to buy their consoles can't.
Even without consoles available at the stores due to the lack of chips issue and being in the middle of a global pandemic and big economical crysis, PS5 is selling faster than any previous console in gaming history. So people is upgrading like crazy and would do it faster if there would be more consoles available.
The thing is that even if people is upgrading at record levels, PS4 sold until now like 120 million consoles, and theres still around 80 million users playing in PS4 every month because people take several years to upgrade to a next gen and we can assume now they may take more time due to the economical crysis. So PS4 ports make sense.
For PS4 owners, it's not as dire since they are still part of the ps eco system but every year sony delays giving their users a reason to upgrade, MS gives them more reasons to switch to them.
PS4 sold over 1500 million games, more than any other console in gaming history, and PS5 not only is selling faster than PS4, their users are also have bigger engagement. And their 1st party games are selling better than ever did. To release some old last gen games on PC doesn't negatively affect their console hardware or software sales, that are better than ever been: it just gives them some extra profits.
Releasing these games on PC also helps them to get some new western fans that may end buying a PS5 to play the sequels and other new 1st party games, while at the same time helps them reach new countries where for several reasons they are PC focused and consoles don't work there.
The Wii sold something crazy like 80 million.
Wii sold 101.6 million becoming by far the best selling Nintendo home console.
PS1 sold 104.3 million, PS2 155 million, PS3 over 87 million, PS4 115.9 million.
Launch aligned PS4 is only 2.5 millioin away from being the best selling console ever in gaming history on its lifecycle point. Launch aligned PS5 is the best selling console ever on its lifecycle point.
They are clearly bullish about the sales of PS5 so ultimately it might not matter and Jim will be seen as a genius who led the PS5 to another generation win, but even that success will come at the expense of gamers who wont get the best from the best sony studios for at least the first two years of the ps5. similar to how the switch has held back arguably the best first party studios in the industry.
Sony is breaking gaming history records for the amount of money made by a console platform holder gaming division, consoles sold, games sold for their consoles, money made from game subscriptions and more.
And their exclusives sell better than ever, get better rated than the ones from their direct competitor and dominated the GOTY awards for the last decade. And Jimbo said they are on track to have more top 1st, 2nd and 3rd party exclusives for PS5 than they ever had for their previous consoles.
Last year they released stuff like Dreams, FFVIIR, TLOU2, GoT, Miles Morales, Demon's Souls and Astro's Playroom. This year they are releasing Returnal, Ratchet, Guilty Gear Strive, FFVII Intergrade, Kena, Horizon, Deathloop, Ghostwire Tokyo, Death Stranding Director's Cut and so on. Next year they will release Forspoken, GoWR, GT7 and many other ones to be announced. It's likely that before the 2nd PS5 birthday we'll get FFXVI, Spider-Man 2, TLOU2 factions, the other game that Guerrilla has been developing since 2018 and the Firewalk game. PS5 players will get a stellar exclusives lineup since day one and with the nice addition of the PS Plus Collection.
We know that the biggest Sony teams (Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Moniac, Insomniac, Guerrilla, San Diego if we count their new studio) are working in at least 2 games at the same time, that PlayStation Studios has over 25 games under development, that their 1st party teams will spend hiring enough money to aprox. double their manpower in a single year and that they are working acquisitions in adittion to improving their 2nd party management team and spending there at ton of money, plus are working to expand 3rd party exclusives specially in Japan, and that they plan to have overall more exclusives than ever.
So no, PS5 users won't miss quality exclusives during or after the first 2 years of the console. Has happened until now, they will continue having more green metacritic exclusives than Xbox and Switch combined every year.
Most of what you're saying sounds to me like PR speak while you conveniently trying to brush over or completely ignore other issues.
I'm just listing facts. If they sound like PR speak and you can't counter them with other facts must be because they are doing a good job.
The fact is that Playstation is now associated with hysterical censorship, exclusives that aren't really exclusives anymore, screwing over developers and a console that has all the cons of the PC without any of the pros with the exception of troubleshooting that only helps the technologically impaired.
Sony doesn't censor games. It's Japanese (and sometimes German/Chinese/United Arab Emirates/Australian/New Zealand) age rating certification / government censorship game certification who doesn't allow certain things, so gore or genitals get removed or highly toned down from Asian versions of the games. Most of these games get only censored only for their Japanese version, so western versions aren't censored. Steam games don't need to pass age rating because they are digital only and global so no retail versions which means they can skip local age rating / government censorship certifications, so games aren't censored there.
In addition to this, a few publishers decided to tone down themselves revealing costumes for their American (or worldwide) versions to get a better age rating when publishing on retail (which gives them access to sell games on certain huge retailers), plus getting less criticism from puritanist and SJWs.
There are country specific sensitive stuff that gets banned in the government certification/censorship (not Sony) from certain countries like nazi stuf for Germany, rising sun flag in Korea, Taiwan mentioned as a country for China, etc.
This government game certification/censorship and age rating doesn't only affects the games published on Sony consoles, it also affects on all platforms. In some cases for all of them, in other cases only retail games need to pass them. So games get also censored in other consoles.
But some of these games aren't released on other consoles, or these other consoles have an install base too small in these countries that aren't worth the cost of making a localized version, so publishers decide to release (and censor) only the PS version there. Other publishers decide to releaser their game worldwide and prefer to have a single version for the whole world so they consider all these censorship/age rating stuff the game in all countries.
Here you have the list of the 'Sony' censored games:
https://forum.psnprofiles.com/topic/85087-list-of-censored-games-ps5-ps4-vita/
As you can see in this list, out of thousands of games released in the recent Sony devices, outside this regional stuff there's only a handful of games who 'got censored' in PS while having an 'uncensored' version in other console and to remove boob gigling and change miniskirt size etc, something not censored by Sony because there are hundreds of games on PS featuring that. So the publishers did it because they decided so or because they wanted to publish the PS version in certain countries that asked to remove that while not planning to release the Switch version on that country.
Jim Ryan and the previous Sony admin not only copied each and every one of Microsoft's shady or shitty tactics but they doubled-downed on them, created a few of their own and generally created a monstrosity of a console where you have to pay to play online sometimes censored games that will eventually be released on PC. The company has become like Apple in a way that doesn't really look for customers but for people to screw over.
A small suggestion to have some credibility instead of sounding as an embarassing hater: mention specific facts that can be double checked and then say you like or dislike them, instead of saying 'this XXX company is evil', 'they become like XXX', mentioning easily debunkable lies, etc.
www.playstation.com
