Pretty sure sony went all in on GAAS because the ‘competition’ was going on a buying spree of every major 3rd party publisher. People were actively saying, “Sony is screwed they have no live service games” once the threat of losing Activision & Blizzard games were on the table.
Thats what competition did, it also caused them to delve further in on subscription gaming and eventually started raising prices.
The best generations Sony had, had no close competitors, Playstation 1 did 100m, N64 and Sega Saturn did under 40m combined. Ps2 did 150, GameCube, Dreamcast and xbox did under 50m combined while Playstation 2 did 150m
the only generation where Sony had legit competition was the 7th gen. Playstation has dominated the home console market for 30 years, this talk of ‘competition’ is nonsense and only started once Microsoft started failing last generation