Origins was first AC game I played. 3 months after completing origins, which had bored me to death, I tried my hand at Odessey. The gameplay was exactly same. It felt like I was playing the same game again. Exact same mechanics and combat style. Uninstalled within half an hour.
Then I tried Unity and Syndicate, because people praise them so much. And I realised that Ubisoft has been remaking the same game over and over for more than a decade now. They just change the setting and rehash everything. The animations in Unity look exactly same as Odessey.
I had the same fear when I picked up Miles Morales, that it would feel the same as previous Spidey game. But they quickly introduced a few new mechanics which made the game feel ever so slightly different.
20 million units of a gaming console hardly sounds like a crisis. People have gotten far too used to sales number of mobile phones. Consoles are not something everyone buys.
Sony will probably follow a 3-year lag release cycle, so yes, they won’t be exclusives eventually. However, emulation is highly unlikely given that almost 10-year old PS4 can still not be reliably emulated.
Your last line reminds me of AMD Vs Intel battle. AMD was cheaper and better value for a lot of years till they were lagging behind Intel on performance. But the moment they attained parity with Intel with their Zen CPUs, they also started pricing their CPUs higher than Intel and also completely abandoned the low end market. Intel’s cheapest 12th gen CPU is currently more than 20% cheaper than AMDs cheapest Ryzen 5000 series CPU here in India.