To be honest, I am quite surprised by the huge amounts of money Sony invests in third-party game exclusives, while at the same time investing very little in original first-party games.
It depends on how much money they have had to spend.
Obviously they were never going to spring for ABK or even ZENIMAX since their annual acquisitions budget has been in the $3-4Billion a year range.
it's what makes the recent KADOKAWA drama so odd: KADOKAWA was valued at $4B when Sony admitted they were trying to buy it. This at a time when KADOKAWA made it clear they would only sell as a unit, not pieces. (ABK was the same. In both cases Sony came back empty handed.) In the end they just bought $300M worth of influence in the running of the company.
It may be that instead of spending $2-3B buying Square-Enix and then having to fund their burn rate, spending $100-200m upfront for a few years exclusivity was the best use they could make of their limited content acquisition cash. MS, on the other hand, can not only buy anything that's not nailed down, they can fund it as long as they produce. And so far their buys have produced in spades. Obsidian in particular looks to be a home run. No losers to date.
For Sony, piecemeal deals to block XBOX may have been all they could afford. After all, all they had to offer was whatever S-E might expect to get off XBOX and if S-E still bought the myth that "XBOX is just a shooter platform" that might not have been much. And in Sony's view what most matters is the console and bragging rights.
The old line about buying the cow to get milk comes to mind. As in, when you buy a studio you don't just buy the IP and whatever game is close to ship, but also the staff, the facilities, and the liabilities from pensions and whatnot. Plus the annual cost of keeping the studio running between game releases.
Sony might have simply being short term wise and long term foolish, which is in line with their launch window sales focus on game releases, the reason they don't and won't soon do day one. The XBOX approach is more of a full life cycle, long tail view: the game might not bring big profits off sales the first month or two but with Game Pass and microtransactions, the game can end up being very profitable in the long term. (FALLOUT 76 anyone?)
Square-Enix new realization isn't necessarily just because of low sales on PS5; they might have discovered how the other big Japanese publishers sales splits run and figured out they sold cheap. And with SEGA considering doing an EA PLAY move, S-E is going to have to take a good look at their full catalog.
If anything, given Japanese companies' incestuous dealings, I'm surprised several of them (say Capcom, Sega, Konami) aren't teaming up to do a combined subscription service. With day one. Between PC and XBOX they'd do good business at a reasonable price. Add cloud and they might not care about consoles at all.
It's something they need to consider because it clearly is working for XBOX and EA. Not sure about Ubisoft but their price is out of line with what they offer.
Which is to say, future games can't be limited to consoles or short term sales revenue alone, just as Hollywood movies that don't set the world afire in theater's still make a profit off digital sales, rentals, and streaming.
The other content market (smaller) gaming studios need to consider is ebooks where a *lot* of authors and small presses are going direct to consumer. No big publisher or distributor; straight to the ebook store. Very doable on STEAM and GAME PASS. Remedy is doing just that.
The changes are just starting.