Based off what? Have we heard of any licensing deals? Have Sony ever mentioned any revenue from patent licenses? Specifically from gaming.
What patents do you think they are licensing out?
Sony bought Gaikai to build PS Now (and get some game streaming patents) and later
got 140 game streaming related patents more with the acquisition of Onlive. Then they continued developing their game streaming architecture and patented a ton of things more (you can google it or search in neogaf) as Sony, some of them pretty recent and still not implemented,
like certain optimizations related to stream over 5G and use phone towers to use them for Edge computing and reduce latency or the
addition of nvme ssds to their game streaming servers pretty likely for their announced future addition of PS5 games to PS Now. Some random example more: they patented browser-based cloud gaming
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170354878A1/en
I have no idea in which division or area Sony includes the revenue they get for licensing patents, or the costs they have for licensing patents other companies filled and they implemented or for when they sue someone for using stuff they patented without getting the license. Tech companies do this all the time with tons of patents filled by them or by others, so they don't announce each one publicly.
You are delusional if you really think that. It would've cost billions and billions to create something like Azure and you keep saying with a straight face they've done that only for PSN and Now....I'm 1000% sure that that is not the case simply because they can't ever recoup the cost like Azure and AWS do because they don't have clients but they build it just for themselves. This also means by your own statement that they own the infrastructure - so they must own serverparks and datacenters all over the globe because that's an huge part of what an infrastructure is. The roads, viaducts, bridges etc. ARE the infrastructure, NOT the cars and trucks that drive on them.
Since the start of PS Now (before starting to using Azure)
they had their own PS3 hardware based servers because there is no other way to run PS3 games with 100% compatibility and at full speed. Later they added PS4 based hardware server racks and now they are making PS5 ones. They also filled or bought like over 200 cloud gaming related patents. Microsoft and Amazon can't build these servers because only Sony makes and own them. So Sony isn't using the (traditional, PC based hardware) Azure (or in the past, AWS) servers.
Sony -as happens with any other company with a big cloud/server based service/app/game- doesn't care if as it is the case some of their servers are stored in their own datacenters (Sony has them), most of them in 3rd party data centers from datacenter companies (traditionally the most used ones because it's the cheapest option) or -not likely because it's the more expensive option- in datacenters optionally provided by Azure or AWS to their customers (Azure/AWS/etc also have their own datacenters + operated outsourced datacenters from 3rd party datacenter companies spread around the world).
Yes, a company like Sony could make their own email app, but it's something dumb when there are products like outlook or gmail out there. They could also build their own type of databases, but there are many good ones out there that they can simply use. They could also make their own image edition tool but it's dumb when they can just get Photoshop.
Same goes with the software to remotely manage (which isn't an infrastructure) their own servers, they could build their own one but there's AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and so on out there. So in the past they were using AWS and now they moved to Azure. They don't care because this software is only a tiny part in all the hardware and software needed to run their business, in this case their PS Now and PSN cloud infrastructure, and these different server management services available in the market all offer them pretty much the same, in the same way they don't care if they servers are stored in a datacenter owned by this or that company, so they don't care to choose one or another. Pretty likely they choose the cheapest one for them in each case, as any company traditionally does.
But again, as happens with the email client, databases or image editing software it's dumb to build your own one when it's cheaper to use good products that someone else already did, which in terms of server space is to rent space to store their own servers in 3rd party data center companies and to remotely manage their cloud of servers to use something like AWS or Azure (plus additional related sofware tools like VPN and so on).
Not a statement of fact as we don’t have the hard numbers. But that is how I have interpreted it when listening to the devs talking about the risks being reduced and allowing them creative freedom.
Only some games are added every month to PS Now or Game Pass, while many hundreds if not thousands of games are added every month to the console, PC and mobile digital stores.
If as it's happening with music or movies the gaming market ends monopolized by a handful game subscriptions, many companies will dissapear because they won't be able to release their games there or at least not as frequently as they would want.
Some game subscriptions offer shitty payment conditions to devs, other ones change case by case but are more generous -specially for popular devs or publishers- (I know an indie who MS paid them almost the entire development for including their game day one on gamepass, other one got paid around 20% of the development budget, and others get barely nothing for including them on PS Now, Gold, Plus or the free games of the Epic Store mostly because are old small games from not popular devs) but their conditions obviously could change if instead of being a smaller business they grow a lot and become market leaders and monopolize gaming.
As dev, when submitting a game to a game store pretty much everything gets greenlighted if it's somewhat decent. In game subscriptions since there is only a limited amount of games added every month the platform holders carefully curate who and what they want there. Devs can't put any game they want on Game Pass, Gold, Plus or PS Now. Sony and MS act as picky gate keepers.