I don't think this is the whole story - or at least not the right strategy for Sony anymore. Sony's PS3 was more or less a market disaster and they were able to

I don't think this is the whole story - or at least not the right strategy for Sony anymore. Sony's PS3 was more or less a market disaster and they were able to claw their way back to #1 by selling the PS4 for $100 less than the Xbox One and taking advantage of Microsoft's terrible, self-centered move of pushing for always-on DRM. Now Sony is making the same kinds of self-centered moves with the PS4 because they are the current leader and feel like they can get away with it. The tech in these platforms is more similar than it's ever been. The consoles are trending towards basically being stripped down multi-core PCs optimized for video and memory bandwidth - especially now with half-step upgrades like the PS4 Pro and XBOne X. For many game developers building on top of engines like Unity or Unreal, they are no longer specifically designing for XBox or PS4 - they are targeting a common engine platform and then just tweaking the game content as needed to make sure it performs well enough on each platform. Combine this with the fact that video games cost more than ever to develop and it makes less sense than ever for a 3rd party publisher to target any single platform. In order to recoup their dev budgets and make big profits, they want as huge an install base as possible. Epic would want Fortnite to run on toasters if they though people would play it there. Platform exclusives are essentially a thing of the past except in cases where the platform holder funds the development or owns the IP. Sony may be the current leader in building first-party, system-exclusive action games to sell their platform, but the number of people who play those games is dwarfed by the mass appeal of something like Fortnite. By gaining the reputation as "the worst place to play Fortnite" (literally the world's most popular game), they are turning off a whole new generation of customers who may swap back to Microsoft when the next console generation hits. In my opinion, this is nothing but Sony taking it advantage of it's #1 console position to try to force people to give them more money in the short term. I'm sure Microsoft would be doing the same thing if their current market positions were reversed. But I don't think it's good for their long-term business.