Sony probably have to make up for the estimated loss of income from Concord. The money was expected to go other places to expand the company overall. I hope the doom cheerleaders are happy.
The plus side is now people don't have to claim the game is shit anymore.
You can't pretend this isn't a sign of a forming trend, though. We already went through this song and dance when Horizon was announced for PC. "Oh it's just this one game". Then it became more. Now it's basically the whole slate, with shortening porting windows.
SIE are now inviting the real possibility of more games going to Nintendo and now Xbox. A future Astro Bot port to Switch 2 isn't off the table. The Uncharted Legacy collection getting a port to Xbox isn't off the table, even Uncharted 4. Helldivers 2 on Xbox (and potentially Switch 2) feels like a lock at this point.
This goes
WAY beyond whatever losses Concord caused, because SIE could easily cover those losses in other ways, such as filing the game and Firewalk as tax write-offs, or other things. As-is, the moves they're making with multiplatform support shows me this is what they
WANT to do going longer-term, not as some short-term fix.
For me, the days of viewing SIE as a platform holder first, are over. That's done. It's not coming back. Going forward I'm going to look at them as a 3P publisher who also happens to have their own gaming hardware, just like I already do with Xbox. For me there are certain things you need to do, and ways to do them, in order to be seen as a platform holder first and foremost, and currently out of the Big 4 only Nintendo and Valve are satisfying those conditions. That's just the damn truth of it at this point.
The funny part is, when I was theorizing about how SIE could've optimally done a multiplatform strategy many months back, it did include Xbox & Nintendo support. But I saw it as very obvious and specific, mainly relegated to legacy PS1-PS3 games/collections, or remakes of very old games, etc. It never included things like Death Stranding (which is a SIE IP, btw) going to Xbox. Not this gen, anyway.
So now what's stopping me from thinking Death Stranding 2 won't be a Day 1 Steam release? That it won't get a port to Xbox in maybe a year from initial launch? Both of those things are absolutely on the table now. This isn't me "dooming"; I'm just making logical conclusions that have some non-insignificant probability of occurring, based on things that have already happened and are happening.
End of the day, I can't help it if SIE are making the moves they're making, that make me doubt just how much of a priority their own console is in their ecosystem going forward. That's on them.