Do you know what the solution is to that "problem"? Make more single player games.
That way the weighted risk for any one first party single player game reduces dramatically. If Ragnorak flopped last year it's a disaster. If Spiderman 2 flops this year it's a disaster. Ironically this is the exact same position Xbox have found themselves in for years - the over reliance on a single first party game to make or break a year for them, and this year it's Starfield. With Xbox it's got to the point where Phil is so beaten down that he doesn't even want to take any high profile risks anymore and he's at the point where he's just saying "fuck it" and will release Redfall in the state that it's in because "what's the point?" right?
It hasn't always been like this, not too long ago Sony made sure there were at least 3-4 big first party games coming out each year from them. That way if one big ticket game underperforms, no big deal.
Let me give you an example. It's 2015, The Order 1886 comes out, it flops (yeh yeh, some people might look back fondly on it, but let's call a spade a spade, it flopped). But no big deal, you know why? Bloodborne comes out just one month later. Suddenly nobody is talking about The Order anymore, everyone is rushing to the store to buy Bloodborne, to purchase PS4's just to play Bloodborne. That's the impact of not having everything riding on one single game. Later that year, Until Dawn also came out and it was a surprise hit. And overall 2015 was one of the lighter years, there are similar stories for pretty much every year of the PS4 generation. Not every game you make is going to be a huge hit, not every game will review well, that's just the reality of it.
The biggest issue that we are witnessing at the moment is the fact that they are not even trying to make the games that "might not be a hit" anymore. Zero risk with single player first party games. So there is no chance we get something like an until dawn from current Sony, there's no chance we get a Days Gone from current Sony, there's no chance we get a Gravity Rush or even a Driveclub from current Sony. What are they doing instead? Redirecting the money that would have once gone into making those games towards all the GAAS crap they are chasing at the moment. It's a travesty.
Let me make this clear - they have the money, they have the resources, they are now choosing to utilise them in a different way. All the risks they are now taking are in the GAAS space. Why? Because they have seen across the industry that even when a fallout 76 comes out, it still somehow manages to make money.
In summary, we're fucked.
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