There is no reason why these types of games should have budgets over 300m$. That's a managment issue. Sony allows their studios to delay games for over 4 years (like with helldivers) and allows projects to go way over the budget. Sony needs to sort it's own managment out.
You have to cure the cancer, not look for ways around It.
It isn't a Sony thing, it applies to all AAA publishers. AAA games cost more every generation because every generation the games have more complex aand detailed visuals, with bigger and more dense worlds, with longer stories with more cutscenes and with more features and secondary stuff. Now people often expects post launch content, which also means more stuff that need to be done so higher costs. And there's more and better competition so in terms of marketing they have a bigger effort.
And all this costs more money.
And well, regarding delays to make games is a creative thing: it isn't like in a factory where everything is scheduled and works the first time: it's an iterative process where things that look good on paper when implemented some things work and need to be redone, and on top of that is a market where trends change super fast, to the point that when they start a game that is going to be innovative maybe it's outdated when released so it's frequent to see games making big shifts during development. Even on stablished franchises.
How about sticking with only supporting their own powerful enough, but still affordable platform, and not release their best games on any competing platform?
The only correct way to do this is not doing it.
The only way to win is not to play.
Playstation absolutely does not need PC lmao. That is a wild fantasy that PC players inflict upon themselves by thinking they have some sort of relevance to the AAA console game space.
The only sustainable/profitable way of to continue being PS only would be to limit their games to their 4/5 most successful IPs and to mostly stop making new IP, new genres and smaller IPs. Because AAA games nowadays cost over $300M and to make them profitable need to sell over $9M, and only a few from Sony achieved that.
Plus the market is focusing more and more on GaaS, so the market for these single player, non-GaaS paid games keeps getting smaller, meaning in the long term won't be sustainable / profitable at least growing and getting better visuals in every new entry.
Even if they have been growing their console active userbase to record levels and also achieving records in most areas they need a way bigger one, specially for the long term once the budgets will grow again for the next generation.
This is the reason of why they need to expand to GaaS, PC, mobile and movies/tv shows: to grow the audience, popularity and profitability of their games/IPs to make them sustainable specially for the future.
How many people would have bought a PS5 for Sony's exclusives and now won't? I bet it's way more than 50K.
Sony has devalued its own platform by porting its games to pc, period.
Nah.
Their games also have been selling better than ever under Hermen / Jim command, or what is the same, during their current PC push:
- Days Gone sold more than all the previous Bend games together
- Death Stranding is the best selling Hideo Kojima game ever
- Ghost of Tsushima is the best selling Sucker Punch game ever
- TLOU broke the record of Sony sales and goty awards for any game
- Spider-Man 2 broke the record of Sony sales after porting the first one and Morales to PC
- Returnal is the best selling Housemarque game ever
- Ratchet Rift Apart is the best selling games in the Ratchet series
- Gran Turismo 7 is the fastest selling game in the entry/Polyphony history
- HFW was selling the same/slightly better than HZD (as I remember Sony's best selling game) after porting the first one to PC until they did put the game on PS+ (too early)
- GoWR broke the record of Sony Sales after poprting GoW 2018 to PC
- Helldivers 2 broke the record of Sony sales when launching day one on PC
So with the exception of Media Molecule, Japan Studio and I assume London Studio basically all their internal teams and many 2nd party ones performed better than ever in their most recent games. Specially the sequels of those ported to PC.
During their current PC push they are also growing in console userbase, didn't decrease. Their active userbase has been growing and currently is at record levels, meaning that new users kept joining more than the ones that left. And on average these users are more engaged than ever and spend more than ever.
As Nishino and Hermen said, PC is helping them not only as secondary revenue/profit channel or to reach new audiences beyond console: it's helping them to grow their sales on console, not to cannibalize them.