Sigh.
Here's the thing.
At its most basic rationale, the reason SIE was never an organization big on acquisitions is the same reason why Apple is not investing in buying a movie/TV studio for their Apple TV initiatives.
It might sound shocking to some of you, but I've said it for the longest time. SIE is a business/organization predicated on being a platform, and they sell you products that is a storefront for other companies to engage in. Similar to Apple and the iOS storefront business.
Someone better at historical sleuthing than me can probably back this up, or clarify in better detail, but sometime in the PS3 era, I think when Phil Harrison was still around, SCE at the time, considered NOT HAVING ANY FIRST PARTY AT ALL. Yes, if someone back then decided different, Sony might've literally sold off all their first-party studios... but keep the PlayStation business.
The point I'm making here - is that for many years, the foundational business anchor that defined how they viewed business and what businesses to partake in at an organizational level at SCE/SIE is the business of being a platform provider, not a content provider. And we can see it in the rationale of how they run aspects of their business at the micro-level, with first-party games getting snubbed over third-party games, because to them, first-party content doesn't mean it gets special treatment from the perspective of someone who manages a third-party platform.
So, even if they have the avenue/opportunity to have acquired some studios/partners in the past, from their POV - so long as they remained within the ecosystem of PlayStation, it doesn't affect their business because the platform business mattered much, much, much more than the content business.
It's also why for large parts of PS1->PS3 era, WWS were more or less a Wild Wild West in terms of management. To my knowledge, at the WWS level, there were no strategic managers, no people in charge of ensuring that no studios overlapped in games, nobody to ensure that games made in WWS were equally supported/localized, where there are 3-5 different "external development arms" within Sony ( Japan Studio, XDev, SSM Xdev, Foster City, etc) and why there are stuff like Invizimals that is only made for one region.
It's only MID-WAY THROUGH THE PS4 GENERATION, that I started noticing a shift in this whole pattern. Sony started to 'care' more about first-party, but it's not to the extent that they're making drastic changes to the organization. They're still a platform company, and that's why we hear Sony saying that they view their position in the market as being 20% at most, to the primarily third-party platform being 80%. You may think that this is some lame position to be in when you can try to pursue a monopoly, but you can ask the same question of Apple too, then and they actually have a fuck-ton of money to become a content monopoly if they wanted to.
The most recent industry shift in consolidation and emphasis on content, especially as the 80% content become at risk of being owned by platform holders is definitely something that caught Sony off-guard and it's not something that they could've quickly pivoted to, given what they felt was the right position for them for years. We'll see what happens in coming months/years.
p.s. Nothing I typed above is new information. I'm pretty sure I've repeated bits and pieces of this over the years.
Damn great insight (as always )
You articulated very well what I was suspecting.
It also begs to wonder if Sony corp see PlayStation as plateform first, aren't MS's recent moves (Gamepass, 3rd P acquisitions, etc..) literally forcing Sony to change PS business model ?
