Punished_Blinx posted... It's not just about the pure sales numbers.
Let's just say Returnal needs 1 million to sell a profit. We know Spider-man 2 needed 7 million from those leaks.
Spider-man 2 has sold 10 million already. So every game sale from now on will make money. Then they'll do the PC port for cheap and it'll sell more. Then they'll remaster it for cheap on the PS6 and it'll sell more. Then they'll bundle it with the other Spider-man games as a trilogy and it'll sell more again. That profit margin just gets larger and larger as time goes on even though the initial cost was ridiculously high. On top of that it makes it more difficult for games like Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad to stack up and compete.
As much as I love these smaller single player AA games unfortunately it doesn't really solve their issue of having small profit margins. That's all games like Returnal really offer at best. We can see this issue from companies like Devolver and Focus who basically solely make those games and nobody is investing into those companies.
That's not to say that Sony can't do better. They can. Overall it's stuff like Helldivers 2 they need more of. They need that high profit margin stuff so the single player AA games and AAA games with long development are offset. They are releasing smaller scale games like Rise of the Ronin and Stellar Blade this year and it's obvious why investors aren't throwing money at them.
The problem here is that the suits aren't settling for those expectations so their goal is to only greenlight Spidermans and TLOUs as a means of guaranteed gains while everything else is neglected.
It's not exactly as dire like the live service model ruining studios after one try because they're single player games but you can tell sooner or later the bubble is gonna burst if we start hearing about 1 billion dollar video games