i'm only going to give a half-hearted attempt to defend Pi but...
...it really comes down to a general sense of sony isn't doing what they should. it's not as bad as nintendo for me yet but my opinion of them really soured on them during the wii era where they were making billions in profit a quarter and they did nothing with those profits to 1. make sure games release regularly 2. make game that don't feel like they cheaped out on the development 3. get stable internet code. 4. ect. and so forth. these bad opinions have re-doubled with switch where despite a "unified" library they have huge periods of no games punctuated by the laziest fudgy ports ever sold at full price. as a gamer i invested a lot into nintendo over the years and i feel taken for granted.
sony posted massive profits in 2020 on the back of playstation,.. then raise prices to $70 and decide they need to port their backlog to PC due to "increase development costs". MS goes out and acquires tons of studios over the last year including a 7.5 billion dollar investment in betheseda and meanwhile sony closes (or reduces or re-orgs) their japan studios. MS did a fantastic job with BC and sony was fine but at the same time clearly not a priority for them. i can "understand" the game delays but at the same time it sucks.
point is,.. sony feels like they've pivoted from a mentality of "how do we delight our consumers" to "how to we delight our investors". i've not soured yet but at the same time i'm not entirely happy either. ....at least sony didn't try to double the cost of ps+ at least.
MS seriously did a number on Gamers when they infested them with these brainworms that to delight your consumers you have to go on massive acquisitions sprees. This shame isn't even something that should be cheered on, but now people practically demand it. Pity not everybody has a parent company that makes over $10bln in profit every quarter to back up these moves.
And I understand disappointment in the few people who actually played and enjoyed Japan Studios output in the last 6-7 years, but people who are mad simply because Sony isn't desperately clinging to teams who've shown no sign of willingness or ability to adapt with the time and put out either commercially successful games or at least games of consistently high quality, because "the competition is investing and they are closing teams" is absurd to me. Same as taking it as an affront to their consumers when a couple of their backlog titles get put on PC.
People's expectations of what represents "delighting you consumers" have completely warped. The PS5 is a vastly better machine for its time than the PS4 was in 2013, even with delays the PS5 will have a clearly stronger lineup in its first year than the PS4 had and PS Plus is, as of now at least, also offering way better things than it did on PS4 in 2014.
I won't be delusional here and act like their investors and making money aren't priority number one for Sony, they are a company, of course they are, but simply because we aren't seeing them make big acquisitions all the time or because they are closing teams that haven't delivered in ages, doesn't mean they are only focused on pleasing their investors now.
I mean even in this record year, their operating income margin is "only" projected to be like 13% as opposed to Nintendo who is projecting a cool 35% (Microsoft of course doesn't publish Xbox numbers, but as a company their margin is also solidly over 30%), I'm sure they would be running a much leaner business if they were doing as little as people tend to accuse them off.
