Sony will have to be more aggressive, as they implied not long ago, about expanding first party. We saw the beginning of this last year. Buying 5 studios in a year was something they've never done before. They need to continue with this. We've clearly heard that they have been throwing money at Square Enix to secure a lot of timed exclusives and pushing to make Final Fantasy a PlayStation franchise for the remainder of the generation. They're going to have to do more. They have been expanding existing studios for sure. Guerrilla, Insomniac, Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, and Firesprite all have anywhere from 2 to 4 projects going. Sucker Punch and San Diego may also be in this boat. Regardless, we know they're growing what they have as fast as they can and before this generation is over we'll likely see just about every Sony studio making multiple games at once.
I know they are loathe to do it, but Sony may have to make a big move here. If Take Two can spend $13 billion on Zynga then Sony can shell out cash to buy something big as well. At this point, an acquisition of Square Enix makes the most sense for them as the companies are already closely aligned. A purchase of Capcom may also be something Sony seriously pursues. It was easy to sit back and hand wave a 7 to 8 billion dollar purchase of Zenimax. A 70 billion dollar purchase of Activision cannot be met with staying the course. Sony will have to spend more money than they probably wanted to but I think they should still be smart about it and not overpay like Microsoft has been doing just for the sake of buying something.
It's not just publishers either. There are still studios out there that Sony should make serious runs at. Bungie, Remedy, Kojima, Arc System Works, and any Warner Bros studio that will almost certainly end up for sale once the transition is complete. Any partnerships Sony currently has should be viewed much more favorably for acquisition. Try to get Haven and Deviation to sell if you like what they're working on. Make a run at Kadokawa who owns From Software. The upshot to all of this for Sony, as we've seen with nearly all of Microsoft's purchases since 2018, is that it is going to take time for the acquisitions to bear serious fruit. This deal cannot even be finalized until some time in 2023. Most of the games currently in development at Activision Blizzard already have PS5 versions coming and post launch content will have to support them. Even a Call of Duty coming in 2024 may still have a PS5 version depending on the timing and what agreements have already been made. Most of the franchises on the Blizzard side of the company are a mess. Any new projects born of this will take quite a few years and some franchises or games just won't mean much in the console space.
This isn't likely to change how this generation was going to end but it will certainly impact how the next one begins. Microsoft is absolutely preparing for that fight and Sony would be wise to arm themselves too.