The time to be concerned was years ago.
When Sony closed Japan Studio in 2021, it marked the end of an era. Just look at the
immense history of games which that studio produced since the inception of the PlayStation. Gone. We will never see most of these iconic IP ever again. In some ways though, what happened to Japan Studio is not too surprising when you look at how much their output had slowed in recent years, as well as Sony as a whole.
Sony have been winding down their middle market operations for a long time. Think your smaller games, your indie developer partnerships, your genre studios like Evolution and Psygnosis, your quirky games for the AA market etc. The days of Shawn Layden standing on stage at E3 telling us how much he loved Vib Ribbon, even if it wasn't a multi-million seller, are over. Sony are now all-in on big AAA productions and money makers ie. the $200 million budget 'movie games' and a dozen GaaS titles.
This is a concern with gaming as a whole and is not a unique phenomenon to Sony. Everything is coalescing and becoming "too big to fail" in a sense. The result is less risk taking, less money devoted to game variety, and, well... worse games. Big companies like Microsoft, Activision, EA, Sony etc. closed many of the studios which formed the bedrock of their identity. Or else they merged them together and drastically cut them down. If you read the language of the press releases whenever that happens to a studio, it's always "re-organized
" or "re-centered" or some shit.
Here is Sony's own graveyard:
Some excellent studios in there which with a bit of cultivation could've still been delivering games to this day. Remember the talk of Sony making an answer to Forza Horizon? Evolution could've made that. GaaS? Why buy up some shitty unproven studios when you had Zipper Interactive. Need more killer apps to sell your new VR platform? They killed off their Manchester and Cambridge studios making exactly those.
That's all this industry is now. As soon as the golden goose stops laying eggs, it gets killed. There's no investment into anything, and legacy means absolutely nothing to these companies. And then farmer Sony realizes that it still needed the goose after all, so it has to go and acquire a new one - which doesn't produce nearly as tasty eggs as the last.