I think they should simply continue with the strategy they currently have because they already are dominating Xbox, have been growing and are on track to grow in all their areas:
- Having get rid of stock issues, console hardware will break gaming history records again.
- After their PS Plus rework they highly increased their gaming subs revenue, and keep setting new records for revenue of amount of subs of gaming subs of a console maker. With more consoles sold, this number will continue increasing.
- After excelling at single player AAA and selling over 20M with many of them, they are also betting and growing on MP GaaS. After great success of Destiny 2, MLB and GT7 pretty likely we'll also see more success than ever there with TLOU Online and new IPs from Bungie, Deviation, Firewalk or Haven.
- They also have been hiring and acquiring in mobile, with Savage or -indirectly- Lassengle or Crunchyroll Games (they recently released Street Fighter Duel and in the past made Naruto, My Hero Academia or Attack on Titan).
- They also have been growing all their internal development teams plus acquiring support teams, meaning that studios like SSM, ND, Guerrilla etc. will work in more teams at the same time so soon will release more normal games.
- They also did hit a new record investing on 2nd party games for this gen recently, meaning that there are more 2nd party games coming than before.
- They plan to have more exclusives than ever for PS5, and since most exclusives are 3rd party, it also means they are pushing more than ever in the 3rd party exclusive area.
- They are also growing on the PC ports of old games area. The previous fiscal year it generated 80M to them and apparently it will generate them 300M this fiscal year. Since ports are very cheap, most of this is profit. They are growing here and isn't negatively affecting consoles or game sales in console.
- They are growing in the tv and movies adaptations area: Uncharted and TLOU have been a success, and they have like a dozen adaptations more in the works.
- PSVR2 had like 50 games at launch and has like around 100 games more announced for the first year or so. Early impressions and sales seem very positive so they may grow in this area too.
- Recently invested in eSports: bought EVO, improved their online tournaments experience, basically all the fighting games improved their online netcode, and even made related accessories. So they may even grow here too.
I think that by continuing their current strategy they'll increase their lead over MS. Don't need to buy big publishers or big IPs.
Let MIcrosoft destroy the gaming industry.
Then Nintendo, Sega and Sony rebuilt the gaming industry.
MS is not relevant enough to destroy the gaming industry. If something, they'd destroy their game division or console.
Fifa and madden cant be exclusives even if ms buys them tomorow. Sport ips re built on licencing and cant be exclusives. Waste of money. Ea s worthless without them.
Only thing they should do s focus on T2. Check if its possible to acquire 51% of shares promising gta ll stay multi. Nba must be multi. Rdr, borderlands....exclusives.
They dont need to get 100%.
Rockstar makes a ton of money, I assume Take 2 or whoever buys them would want to keep it multi. As you mentioned, NBA2K pretty likely would also keep multi because the licensor may require it, and because makes sense.
In any case, Sony doesn't have the budget to buy them, and if they would buy them they'd keep them multi because they make these acquisitions for the money and keeping them exclusive means less money. They'd simply block exclusives for the other consoles and would keep them only exclusive maybe for game subs and bundles.
Either way they must do something imo. Cant lose mqjority of popular 3p ips.
They don't need to do anything. They outperform their direct competitor for more than 2:1, and pretty likely they won't even lose CoD. Not because of regulators, because as MS said it woudn't make finantial sense to make it exclusive and keep it away from its main revenue source.
Sony should just sit on their thumbs and continue signing 3rd party deals, while MS goes on to buy their way into a monopoly, of course.
Nah, even if they complete the acquisition Sony will continue dominating them and MS will continue with a small market share. They won't have any monopoly. Even if MS buys after EA and Take 2.
And at some point the MS higherups or shareholders will ask them to stop burning money and go instead to do something to turn their gaming division into a profitable business and if not will sell it by parts.
