This is Sony’s strategy:
1 - Keeping improving PS Plus.
2 - Keeping supporting PS Now but without major releases day one or trying to make it a Game Pass rival in terms of quality or features.
3 - Launching PSVR2 in late 2022 for 399 USD.
4 - In the long term, shutting down their smaller studios like PixelOpus, Media Molecule and Japan Studio (they have already shut down this one). Instead of supporting smaller studios, make Naughty Dog, Insomniac and such grow to be multi-team studios so that they can work on multiple games at the same time (like Playground is doing with Fable and Forza Horizon 5).
5 - In 2 or 3 years, releasing PS2 Classic Mini.
6 - Doubling down on timed exclusivity deals.
7 - Investing more in the PC market. Pretty much all PS4 games will end up on PC and in 2 years or 3 PS5 exclusives will start launching on PC too.
8 - Sony has noticed that Hitman 3, No Man’s Sky, Resident Evil 7 or Skyrim’s VR modes have done a much better job selling PSVR devices than whatever first party games VR games they have made like Astro Bot, that is why they will invest in third party VR games - like Doom 3 VR - and shut down their own VR studios. What they’ll do is wait until they release the VR games they are working on - which will be PSVR2 launch games - , and then they will let those employees’ contracts run out. Just like they did with Japan Studio after releasing Demon’s Souls - co-developed by them - and Astro’s Playroom.
9 - Trying to establish the PlayStation and PlayStation Studios brands as “premium” or elitist brands in the gaming industry, they’ll try to be gaming’s Apple. That’s why you hear Jim Ryan say Game Pass wouldn’t work for them, because in his eyes a subscription service would devalue their games and they want to sell 80€ (95 USD) games, and they can only get away with that with an elitist or Apple-like approach.
10 - They have abandoned the mobile market completely, they won’t make any new mobile consoles.
11 - They are not going to cut PS4’s price because they want every user to jump to PS5 as soon as possible. This is a bad idea because that is killing the system’s legs in Japan and other Asian markets. They used to cut olders consoles’ price after their successor had come out.
12 - They won’t invest further in backwards compatibility of any kind.
13 - They won’t invest in Japanese first party games.
14 - They won’t acquire big publishers or big studios but they will probably acquire smaller studios like Bluepoint and Housemarque and make them grow so they can be multi-team studios.
15 - I’m pretty sure the only reason Team Asobi has not been shut down yet alongside the rest of Japan Studio is that they are making Astro Bot 2 and it’ll be a PSVR2 launch game next year. Once that game is out, though…