Thats like saying the new Playground Games studio is Lionhead because they are also doing Fable(they even have some ex-Lionhead staff). SIE San Diego and 989 are two different studios. They still used the 989 brand name for sports game for a while.
Again different studios. One is based of Japan and other on England.
Most of Team Ico staff left with Ueda to form genDESIGN
Ehh, I feel like you are going too much into the unnecessary nitty-gritty detail for stuff that really doesn't even matter. I'm not interested in doing a list or number war for the sake of it. I highlighted these studios because Sony has been able to either seamlessly and successfully reintegrate their projects and staff into a new studio (SIE San Diego is a successor to 989 Studios), or reincorporate and reallocate the functions of these studios into other ones (SIE Japan Studio AND XDev provide external development support for Japan and Europe, respectively). So while 989 Studios and Contrail may have technically been "shut down," it's disingenuous to think that this was because of poor management or that Sony is careless with their studios. Some of this can be due to rebranding, reorganization, merging, or something else. And the purpose of highlighting Team ICO was that they were an internal team inside SIE Japan Studio, and Sony did not close them. Fumito Ueda left and his team left alongside him.
List wars aside, BOTH companies have shown their incompetence in managing first party studios. The amount of studios Sony has closed is way too much, and it's disheartening. I really miss Studio Liverpool. But to act like only the number of studios closed is the only thing that matters, is not true at all. If that was true, then you'd have to ignore Ueda leaving Sony altogether, because Japan Studio was not closed. And Sony didn't even shut down Team ICO, Ueda left and his team went with him. And it's dumb to ignore that, because him leaving was a pretty big deal at the time and you could probably place some blame on Sony. And you'd also have to ignore Sony's newer studios created to pick up some of these projects or functions, as I stated above.
Sony's main first party problems have been shutting studios, bleeding talent, lack of support for games after release, poor marketing, and shunning some of their historical IPs. Microsoft's have been wasting talent, lack of diversity, and lack of freedom in tackling new and different types of games.
