Nobody knows what the profits are for sub plans. Also, before Sony stopped stating PS+ count, the count was actually trending flat for 3 years.
Sony's gaming division profits have actually gone down since key covid bump year. But even if you exclude that lucky year which a lot of tech companies for a short term bump in sales with people at home, it's roughly $2B/yr profits since 2017.
I don't have to be a math genius or an insider to know that Game Pass is a money pit. They pretty much conditioned their user base to NOT buy games.
Last year they had a CRAZY amount of BIG day one games coming to Game Pass. That is expensive as FUCK, specially when you don't have the weight of being the biggest platform holder behind you helping you get better deals because of the exposure and overall leverage.
They are for absolutely fucking sure paying a crazy amount of money for those games. It's becoming increasingly clear that if you don't release your games on Game Pass, said game becomes a flop sales wise on the Xbox. What that means is when Microsoft is cutting a developer a deal for Game Pass, they are pretty much agreeing to pay for both the catalogue rights and the dev cost of the Xbox version.
If they didn't do that, I'm pretty sure a lot of these devs would be fine with not releasing a Xbox version at launch and waiting for maybe another opportunity, since it wouldn't be a big piece of the sales pie. Microsoft is essentially having to bribe devs to get games on their platform. Do you understand how dire that situation truly is?