I'd agree with this sentiment if Sony hadn't provided several examples of it simply not doing this. Increasing its game prices by 25% in my country for nothing, raising the price of its hardware in my country after release when no one else did, locking (poor) emulation behind an expensive subscription, several low effort re-releases to "justify" full-priced PS5 titles. From my perspective, Sony isn't providing value, it's just ringing as much money from its customers as possible. PlayStation's current administration is simply cashing in on the hard work done by prior PlayStation teams. That's all well and good for their immediate bonuses, but they're potentially hurting the long term prospects of the brand. If they stay the course, towards the end of this generation the brand will be known for "pay more for less" instead of "For the Players". The current admin will jettison, pocket their parachute cash, and leave another team to clean up.
You can feel that way, but understand that there are always economic factors driving these decisions, it's never as simple as "this company wants to screw me over".
>Game Prices Increase: 3P publishers were already wanting to do this, and the MSRP for full retail prices has already stagnated at $60 for two generations despite increasing costs in game development. For every gen prior to 7th gen, the average game price was increasing post- PS1/Saturn, and in the case of those two systems, the average cost actually dropped due to a switch to a new storage medium (CDs).
We haven't seen any such switch in storage mediums since 7th gen and yet game production costs keep increasing. A nominal increase by $10 was probably inevitable, and now there's the thought Microsoft could be considering their own increases as soon as Q1 2023.
>Console Price Increase: Blame that on the fluctuations in currency exchange and the fact that Sony are a fraction of the size of MS and can't just bleed costs on console hardware, and they don't have console tech three gens behind the way Nintendo does with Switch so they can't price the hardware reasonably while having a fat profit margin off the console itself.
>Emulation Behind PS+ Premium: I agree that Sony could be doing a lot better on this front, so no disagreements there.
>Remakes/Remasters: Welp, the value depends on the person looking at it. And apparently enough people see value in things like TLOU Part 1 Remake to have it chart NPD in the Top 5 for its debut month.
As to the rest of your comment, the irony is that we may have some similar agreement on the general notion, but probably have VERY different things driving those opinions in spite of generally having that agreement. To me, Sony not prioritizing their core constituency (PlayStation console owners) is what would cause long-term prospects to dry up, and if they push too much into PC (and to a lesser extent, mobile) to where more PS owners look over there and see the value that way (better graphics options, higher framerates, free online, mod support, KB&M support, etc.) that they don't see on PlayStation (because of lack of balance or focus on Sony's part),
THAT is what would cause what you claim could end up happening, IMO.
But that gets into a whole different kind of conversation...
Where does it say in the chart profit is up for sub plans?
I'm going with the general notion that profit margins are up because services revenue is up in spite of the sub count dropoff, and we know Extra & Premium/Deluxe cost more to sub to than Essentials.
The costs for implementing and operating the higher tiers is absolutely not proportional to the price increase for the end customer to pay for them, but the profit margins at the higher tiers likely scale much more linearly at a locked ratio with the sub cost itself, therefore profits for them off PS+ as a whole is likely up considering the revenue increase from that segment.