Sony wouldn't be closing and reshuffling their studios if they were making them money. Keep pumping out a bunch of games with limited appeal and something's gotta give sooner or later.
There are a few studios that likely didn't make money off of recent projects, bigbig, and definitely evolution studios along with liverpool. But consider that over a year ago, the head of SCEWWS said that all of their internally developed projects, so far, had been profitable for the company. Cambridge hasn't released a game in some time, so it's obvious that they weren't generating income directly, hence the downsizing, but that's hardly 'the majority of their studios'. If the majority of their studios weren't generating income, then we'd be seeing many of their smaller, leaner, studios being cut, and instead Sony has continued to invest in them, while dramatically expanding Naughty Dog, Guerilla Games, and Santa Monica.
From a business standpoint there's no evidence that the majority of their internal studios are unprofitable, or anywhere close to half of them. Internal studios are only a drain on income if the platform in question is too limited in its potential audience and not appealing to said audience properly. Why would Microsoft invest in more internal studios now, after closing a lot of their old ones? What's so useful about opening new internal studios at the beginning of the generation for them when they already have a huge IP like Halo that will doubtlessly be there, and the best third party support in the industry (and will doubtlessly tie up some third party developers to exclusives just like they got Gears in this generation).
The answer is because in opening these new studios they can better align them to what they feel the demographic of the next Xbox will be than with the old studios that they felt were out of alignment, and oftentimes restricting or forcing a studio to become something else just wont work as well as opening a new studio from the ground up years later. The fact is that first party studios aren't anywhere near a money drain is handled properly and the studio isn't bloated. Sony knows this, and so does Microsoft.
