Sony's death-grip on their platform is more profitable than selling the game. They only fund games to promote the Playstation brand. There is nothing else propping up the Playstation brand. Without lock-in they only make a decent gaming PC with a weird OS.

I sincerely think they're rattled by Microsoft turning Xbox into a gradient... or whatever the fuck Microsoft is doing. Xbox exists specifically to PC-ify the console market, and they've succeeded so completely that the console market is now two AMD laptops versus an Android tablet.

Sony saw how much money they were making just being a PC publisher and it scared the shit out of them. They desperately do not want to be just a PC publisher. This debacle has been a direct overreaction to that possibility.

So on the plus side, Sony's not extracting value from your name and phone number. They want it to be 2004 again. They want every game to be for one platform, so no matter how good or bad their machine's games are, they can sell the machine as having their games. But that model nearly sunk the PS3, as multiplatform development triumphed, and now Microsoft has tricked them into releasing PC ports. MS isn't talking about Halo on PS5 because they need the sales, you know? Sony wants to keep winning the console war... but Sony needs there to be a console war.