One thing I find funny about all the people who are basically just pointing to sales data, market data, and revenue to go "This is fine!", what they fail to ever address specifically WRT this showcase, is simple: Why does this expansion into focusing more on PC, focusing more on live-service GaaS, come at the expense of having more than a SINGLE non-live service/GaaS 1P game at their own proper Showcase in almost two years?
Sony should be understanding of what the meat & potatoes are among their software offerings that have earned them such respect and loyalty among their core fanbase. Yet the first Showcase event in almost two years where they start to actually push their live-service/GaaS offerings and PC Day 1 (seemingly) releases (at least for the live-service/GaaS titles) comes at the expense of having anything to show from any of their other teams that's a non live-service/GaaS reveal (with gameplay) outside of Insomniac's Spiderman 2. It's potentially very fair to speculate that such a shift in increasing focus on those things has come at the expense of their marquee content.
The core fanbase that take to the God of Wars, Spidermans, Horizons, Ghosts of Tsushimas, Gran Turismos etc. are also by far the biggest spenders in the ecosystem (by ARPU). They're among the core constituency. To say a lot of them probably weren't satisfied with yesterday's showcase is an understatement. You cannot focus on expanding your audience if it comes at the expense of your core; Microsoft have realized this first-hand in terms of gaming and it seems Sony are skirting dangerously close to doing much of the same. The insane part being, they could have easily just looked to Nintendo's model because out of the three, Nintendo has managed this expansion the best without necessarily diluting the value incentives of their console or not satisfying their core audience with the games they regularly expect.
All Sony had to do, IMHO, is just take from that model. There is a chance they have learned this now WRT PC and might treat that platform as mainly a ground for the live-service/GaaS titles instead going forward. However, they've still conditioned a lot of PC gamers to expect and feel entitled to the marquee 1P non live-service games on their platform, on storefronts, OSes and hardware Sony doesn't own, and Sony walked into setting up that expectation themselves. It'll take a long time for that to simmer down. Meanwhile I feel the time on the PC ports earlier could've been better spent making a push into mobile, leveraging classic IP to do, with smaller teams suited to that platform. Would've required even less resources to potentially generate some big gaming cash cows that would've made prioritizing PC for ports of the marquee games an irrelevant non-priority.
And since I've mentioned Nintendo, it's also funny how all of the same people who try arguing Sony should "simply copy Microsoft" and do Day 1on PC for their games, push for all games in their sub service Day 1, ease off of 3P exclusives (yet not acquire publishers to compensate, funnily enough), push for GaaS etc...never bring up these suggestions for Nintendo to make more money. "Oh but Nintendo doesn't NEED to make more money!" well no shit, no company "needs" to make more money but I'm sure they'd love to make more if it made sense. "Nintendo games sell at full price for many years" yeah because they told beggars wanting steep discounts and price drops to GTFO and conditioned them to value those games just as much as they as the publisher do. "Nintendo's games sell way way more" yes because, again, they've conditioned everyone to accept they'll never put the new games in a sub service, or port them to PC.
Nintendo's model isn't necessarily conductive to 3P publishers, but if 3P publishers are already pushing for platform agnosticism of their own anyway, to the point platform holders have enabled crossplay, crossbuy etc., then I can't blame platform holders if their needs shift more to serving themselves in an industry where costs keep creeping up and up and up. Sony's potential problem is that they are pursuing solutions that favor a much larger company to whom gaming revenue means absolutely nothing to their bottom line (Microsoft) and to whom console gaming is to an extent expendable if it means solidifying gaming on a much more valuable OS they happen to also own (Microsoft, Windows), rather than a model that benefits/favors a smaller company where gaming revenue is critical (Nintendo, themselves).
Ideally, Sony should be doubling-down on their unique strengths and going all-in on them, which in terms of the types of games they make, are single-player driven narrative action-adventures, realistic & cartoony, across multiple genres. They have a model to follow in expanding those games while still keeping the core which identifies their games brand-wise intact, just looking at games like GT7. There's a rumor Insomniac are working on a live-service/GaaS Spiderman-themed game, right? Why have them do that instead of a "Spiderman Online" multiplayer mode provided in addition to the main single-player Spiderman 2 campaign? That you can play locally with friends, or online? You could still have the MTX content built in there, and add content over time, maybe eventually offer the mode as a standalone F2P thing if it really takes off and shows that growth potential. But that sounds better IMO than isolating it to its own game, and by keeping them together, could incentivize other MP stuff like specific co-op scenarios unique from the main campaign but still of the same quality, just built with two players in mind.
Meanwhile, keep expanding and growing the scale of the single-player marquee AAA offerings, listen to the fans who have been asking for classic IP to come back and do as AA-sized remakes, reboots and sequels. I'm sure some of those would also work very well on mobile, if you're looking to expand content further there. At the end of the day though, as a platform holder you ALWAYS have to keep your core happy and at least in terms of transparency on info/footage/gameplay of the types of games Sony's core are the biggest fans of, they have not done a good job of it for a while now. Nothing on that front from 1P aside Spiderman 2 was just abysmal, and no amount of pointing to bar graphs, pie charts, dollar signs and percentages is going to change or explain THAT reality.
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