How many more consoles did Sony sell than Xbox last gen even though they had pretty much the same third party support?
120 million to 40 million and a lot of those were because of the first party difference makers.
XB1 was done already long before even a single 1P exclusive showed up on PS4, what carried the console was indeed 3P games and ability to play them for 100$ less (plus no always-online DRM bullshit). If you'd dig up old GC/E3/TGS threads you'd find countless posts of people not only being disappointed, but actually angry at Sony for not showing anything more than cross-gens, lazy remasters and indie ports from PC/mobile, the "Playstation (4) has no games" meme was more alive than ever before, and it was all merely 6-7 years ago. But then UC4 showed up, then HZD, GoW, S-M, and so on and so on, and people quickly forgot, but before any of those games arrived, PS4 was already established on the market as the absolute dominant console of the generation.
So it's a question whether the software really carried the hardware, or was it the other way around? Because keep in mind, the gen before PS4 no one gave a damn about Sony's exclusives, people went straight after the cheaper console (X360) without even thinking twice. And all the Nintendo praise you see nowadays? WiiU anyone, we forgot about that one already? Where were all those legendary IPs to sell the system? So again, if Switch didn't sell as well it sold, all those Marios, Zeldas, Pokemons etc. would again be completely meaningless, let alone hitting 20M+ numbers.
But going back to Sony specifically - IG games sell within just 2-3M range, and nobody cries when they're gone (OK I lied here because I still cry after Resistance), their only truly huge hit is Spider-Man, you know, "only" the biggest, most popular super hero on the planet, not even Batman and Super Man come close nowadays thanks to what MCU is doing, basically the name alone carried the game, last week people went out of cinemas from NWH and S-M2 trailer immediately saw an uplift in views, you'd have to be blind or ignorant to not to see the correlation. But IG's own IPs? Nothing significant, and they've been under Sony's wings since forever.
Sucker Punch? Same deal basically, they've been making inFamous for god knows how long, which is just a decent franchise at best, arguably Prototype was the more fun counterpart to play back in the days, and they literally just now hit the jackpot with GoT, which again, was released on an already established ~120M userbase, so did the game carried the console, or did the console do a huge favor for the studio and their new game?
GG - again, up until HZD they were nothing special, KZ franchise is pretty much dead because of how poorly they managed it, the games just kept getting worse and worse.
So all in all, those studios weren't all that great until Sony started pumping some serious money into them while the console kept selling on its own. Like that infamous tweet said - Sony's talent = money and time. Because really, those guys have the longest dev cycles in the entire industry (well maybe except Star Citizen
), while making just the SP campaign, and half of the game takes place in mo-cap studio. And still, people seem to have a very short/selective memory - Driveclub? Bombed. Days Gone? We all know the story. Death Stranding? Not a huge seller either, Sony rejected Kojima's next project for a reason. The Last Guardian? The game came and gone unnoticed. So while there are those games that indeed sold in 15-20M units and were hugely successful, don't let that blind your vision, because there are just as many games that were a total miss, some even resulting in studio closures (RIP Evolution).
And speaking financially? It's Sony's executives themselves that openly admit that their games are literally unsustainable, so if anyone did the right math, it's Sony themselves.
The bottom line is, if there's no hardware, the software won't sell, the attach rate is a real thing, if 1 on 20 people decides to gave the game a try, it's crucial to have a 100M userbase instead of 10M.
