Talent costs money. They are about to lose a gigantic chunk of their yearly revenue. That is going to cut their budget they provide to their first party talent to produce those new IPs at a consistently high quality.
- Horizon - 6 years in development
- Horizon 2 - 5 years dev time
- Days Gone - 8 years in dev
- Ghost of Tsushima - 6 years dev time
- GoW - 5 years dev time
- Dreams - 9 years
Without CoD, without that COD userbase that makes up a huge portion of the 45 million PS+ userbase, Sony doesn't have the funds to wait years on these guys. They made $25 billion last year. Only $3 billion in profits so their operating income was $22 billion. Remove cod, remove even a small 10-20% of that PS+ userbase and digital revenue and they go in debt immediately.
Then all of a sudden they cant afford to delay these games like they do. They start shipping them unpolished. They gut the teams to reduce yearly operating costs. You end up with something like Nintendo. Even fewer games than we get today. Smaller in scope. I mean when was the last time Nintendo first party even released an AAA game? Breath of the Wild in 2017? These guys are printing money but they cant afford to have the same operating costs as Sony because they dont have CoD.
Bottomline is that everyone relies on free revenue from third party games like CoD and Fortnite. Where they do nothing other than maybe pay a few million in a marketing deal. They rely on free PS+ money. There is no real costs for that sub. PSN Store pays for itself. Activision pays for CoD servers. Epic Store filing shows how free games cost a few million max. PS+ is like 90% profit. Thats their entire business model. Their board knows this. They simply cannot hope that the cod audience doesn't leave. They have to account for the worst case scenario and they are going to have to drastically cut down costs to reduce their spending. Forget new acquisitions, they will demand cost reductions.
And all of that is going to negatively impact Sony first party.