I think Bluepoint was speculated for a really long time but nobody claimed to know it would happen. As for Insomniac I saw some speculation over Microsoft buying them but nobody leaked Sony buying the dev.
Looking at all the acquisitions it was Sony themselves that leaked Bluepoint getting bought.
Yep, on top of that -previous to Sony's accidental leak- Bluepoint was another of those safe bets for fan predictions. It's like betting that Sony would buy Kojipro or FromSoft/Kadokawa. Or even Capcom or Square.
When people speculates who should or would buy Sony, these names always appear/appeared in most predictions.
Notice also that these fake 'leaks' from 'insiders' are always with some of these safe bets. They aren't for less expected things where Sony said they want to expand like with a porting team because they want to port more games to PC (Nixxes), an Asian mobile game studio (Lassengle), a -mostly- VR team (Firesprite+Fabrik).
Fake leaks are mostly related to flashy safe bets.
Sony ain’t acquiring a publisher in the gaming space, because they won’t clear the funds for it and it’s that simple. The talking suits over there have nightmares about Sony potentially being seen as a videogame company.
What do you mean? Jimbo said they want to expand to try to reach all these billions of gamers that are outside PS, so pretty likely won't stop at PC ports, mobile games and cloud gaming but also following the path they created with Bungie: to buy a publisher and put it under SIE but not under PS Studios, in order to get money from other consoles without porting there their PS Studios IPs.
Sony also wants to bring PS IPs to movies, tvs shows and anime, and would welcome more popular content for PS+. And well, MS and Tencent are buying stuff so would be a good idea if Sony would secure certain key leaders of genres not covered by their 1st+2nd party games.
So it would be a good idea from Sony's side to acquire some publishers. Particularly Square (JRPG, MMORPG) or Capcom (survival horror, fighting + related eSports, MH). Sony would become leaders in these genres and wouldn't depend on 3rd parties for them, would grow in the other consoles, PC, mobile, Asia, eSports, movie/tv show/anime friendly IPs, etc. On top of that, these publishers would increase SIE and Sony revenue and profits.
I think their acquisitions would highly benefit them, I don't see why Sony management or shareholders (who btw all three share almost the same external top shareholders, which makes the acquisition easier, safer and more productive for the shareholders) would stop it or think it's a bad idea. I think that if these acquisitions don't happen is because SE an Capcom owners don't want to sell and prefer to continue as an independent company.