It doesn't strike me as severe if they outsource it to China instead of taking their established studios off other stuff for it.
But except for having China do the work, you're describing what they DID do with Concorde and FairGames and generally Helldivers and Marathon and the Firesprite TM project. Sony started a new studio or found an external studio specifically to develop GAAS projects.
Had they done this to begin with, their gaas push wouldn't have impacted their output very much the past few years.
Maybe, but when you look at the output of other traditional game development studios in the SP or basic MP market, they ain't outputting at a high rate either in the past few years.
The thing is about these internal GAAS projects at established Sony studios, most were side projects coopting their existing work to build a companion game. These types of projects would have been tough to pass along (since it would have meant outsourcing another studio to get up to speed on their engine and assets; it's doable, ala the DLC and "New Vegas" type of side games in the past, but it's a hard handover to get right,) and ideally these would have kept the bulk of teams busy while the creative heads majored or the main projects. Production difficulties unfortunately didn't work out that way.
Look at the list, these were mostly the "Multiplayer Mode" that a game would have shipped with back in the day, just separated for a much longer and more complex runway. Ghost of Tsushima Legends was released that way, Horizon Online will be (unless something goes bad,) Insomniac's Spiderman Great Web would have been that, TLoS Online would have been that had it not blown up to an unmanageable scale, etc. We don't know much about the Bluepoint GoW or whatever the Bend GAAS was but there probably was recycling in at least Bluepoint's project and maybe Bends.
Few and maybe none of the in-house studies were working on original GAAS titles; they were all franchise works being produced alongside core project work (or were at least greenlit to do so, but the gravitational orbit of making a GAAS sucked in way more people when the ball started rolling downhill.)
...It's possible that this was all a bad idea, that turning a successful franchise into a GAAS is not a simple pivot. The one great success story out of Sony's GAAS push has been Helldivers 2 (a sequel to a proto-GAAS,) and that was a fresh title by an external studio. Meanwhile, few of the blockbuster GAASes were name-brands before they hit (Apex Legends even hid its Titanfall roots,) and the GAAS graveyard is filled with big brands which popped trying to be GAAS. So, maybe? But then again, Sony's greatest failure story out of the GAAS push was a brand new IP at a brand new studio, and that failed. The formula just isn't easy.
Good luck to you out there Convallaria...
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