PlayStation operating income has dropped by 30%, Sony stock price took a nosedive, and they realized that SIE is selling PS5 well below its market value ...
Yes, their ROI goes down in SIE FY22 because in FY22 they have big acquisition costs from Bungie, Haven and more to come etc. Acquisitions are long term investments that fuck the ROI of that year but (normally) pay off in the long term. In FY21 they did spend way less in closing and paying acquisitions. It's something normal, doesn't mean Sony is dommed, that there is an internal tin foil conspiracy or something like that. Some years their biggest acquisitions are in a division and other years are in another. That's all.
Same goes with the console price increase. The causes are that the costs of making it skyrocketed in recent months way above that 10% increase and pretty likely due to inflation and fuel pricing will continue doing it in the next ones. Not only the components they buy for the console get more expensive for them, but also the shipments costs rise due to the fuel pricing, plus also the dollar highly increased their value fucking them as Japanese company with USA as their top 1 country and the overall inflation from anywhere also skyrocketing everywhere.
They already were selling the console at a loss, so now with all these recent changes not controlled by Sony the loss will be way higher even with the price increase. It is not due to a tin foil conspiracy of supposedly evil and greedy executives. Many other electronic products like Quest 2, PC GPUs, phones, etc (specially those not overpriced, the ones being sold at a generous profit) also rised their prices.
Same with game prices. Adjusted with inflation, game prices from all generations since the eight bit were priced when adjusted with inflation way over $100, while they were developed badk then with way smaller budgets. The AAA of today cost hundreds of millions to be developed and marketed, while in the '80s and '90s did cost under a million or a handful millions, they were made by a few guys in months, sometimes a bit over a year. Now they need like 4-6 years in most cases (sometimes more) and involve over a thousand (and sometimes over 2000) people.
And that was at the end of the previous generation or early games using basically previous gen engines, workflow etc. True next gen AAA games will be even way more expensive. So publishers (not only Sony) decided to increase the pricing for theit next gen console (not only in PS, also in Xbox) games.
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