Woefully inaccurate. Big profit is, and always has been, more important than small profit for commercial enterprise.
Yes, big profit is better than smaller profit. They do make way more profit than before. And well, they now make profit.
David Jaffes style God of War action games made PlayStation a lot of money. They could have continued making those types of games but SSM went to PlayStation executives and said "What if we made an Uncharted style God of War game and it sells 18 million copies?" Do you think we're going to see an old school God of War anytime soon? Of course not.
Everybody agrees that GoW 2018 was a masterpiece and the right way to refresh GoW. The series needed that because GoW Ascension felt outdated and stagnant.
Respawn Entertainment made two single player focused Titanfall games (both profitable). Then they made Apex Legends. Do you think we're going to get Titanfall 3 anytime soon? No. These companies ALWAYS follow the larger profit.
Titanfall 3 doesn't exist because Titanfall 2 tanked hard in sales.
Sony isn't going to abandon single player but they are going to do what they've always done, and that's follow the larger profits.
Yes, they will follow the larger profits which means to continue with their current strategy because it's the one that gave them larger profits and more importantly, larger revenue for any platform holder in gaming history. And that strategy is to make money mostly from 3rd party sales on their consoles, so they will try to sell as much consoles as possible, and they will try it with mainly exclusive games, which mostly will continue being single player focused games but they will -as always- make multiplatform games.
And will continue having secondary growth channels as mobile games, streaming (with the long term goal they set in early 2014 of making it available everywhere), VR, movies using their IPs and some PC ports. And well, they'll continue growing their internal development teams and acquiring more and to combine that with 2nd and 3rd party exclusives trying to cover a very wide amount of game types.
This strategy has been their strategy since before Jimbo and Hulst got their current position, they only pushed a bit harder in some of these areas.
AAA single player is getting so expensive that greenlighting sure fire hits is the only strategy that makes sense. Lower tier, riskier type AAA is going the way of the dodo. That wasn't the case 5+ years ago.
You're like Sam Darnold. You're seeing ghosts out there. This conversation has got you seeing that I never said or implied.
The dial is turning at PlayStation.
No, they are dominating more than ever and they continue with the same strategy they had years before.
They'll adjust depending on what makes the most sense each year.
No, big corporations plan their strategies looking at 5 or 10 years ahead. Specially in gaming, where AAA games need 4-6+ years of development.
I strongly suspect that the dial gets turned towards multiplayer over the next 5 years.
And here's the list of AA or AAA multiplayer focused games from that list...
Gran Turismo Sport
PlayStation is now flush with those types of games in the works. The level of multiplayer investment has skyrocketed since Mr. Worldwide Jim Ryan and God King Herman Hulst took over. You love to see it.
Sony invests less in multiplayer focused games because they are not as successful for them as single player focused games. This is why single player focused is and will continue being their priority and they left MP mostly for 3rd party since they dominate it, are mostly played on PS and Sony gets 30% of that.
Wolverine, DS DC and GoT DC (SP focused) and Jade Raymond's game (MP focused) I think are the only project we know that are greenlighted by them. All the other ones we know and saw were already greenlighted before they joined their current position in late 2019 or will continue the same path these studios already had. We know Housemarque will now a AAA biger than Returnal but we don't know if will be SP or MP focused. If it's a Returnal sequel, we may assume it's SP. Same goes with Deviation's game, we can assume it may be MP focused but we don't know it and this summer we knew they had been working with Sony for more than a year. So pretty likely before Hermen got in charge at the end of 2019.
We know Days Gone was going to feature a secondary MP as usual in Sony AAA games. It was cut and moved to its sequel that wasn't greenlighted to be developed now, but it was greenlighted an open world new IP that would use what they built for Days Gone, so probably will be focused on SP but will have secondary MP.
All the other ND, SSM, San Diego, Insomniac, Pixel Opus, Media Molecule, Firesprite, Team Asobi, Polyphony, Guerrilla, Kojipro games were under development when they joined this job position or will continue doing the same type of games they did until now, most of them SP focused by many of them with SP elements.