Same is true for TV shows and Games though. Gaming is far from a mature market. Everyone doesn't have a console in their home. There is still plenty of room to convert people onto gaming. Its why you see so many stories of Google/Amazon and MS talking about the future of gaming. If the gaming market was saturated you wouldn't see anyone talking about how big gaming is going to be, it'd be about how big gaming was.
Do you think companies invest several millions of dollars into things expecting them to flop and be terrible? Like do you think HBO is spending tens of millions of dollars to develop, produce and advertise something they expect to stink and flop? The answer is clearly no.
As you point out, nothing is guaranteed. So of course there is a chance it ends up not doing very well, but i doubt that's what they are planning or hoping for. Now lets imagine the game does, decently not next GoT but decently and they don't prepare for it. Where does a new fan go to get their TLoU fix? Digitally its only on PSN which you can only access through a PS4/PS5 you cant convert someone over if they to already have your product before having a look at what they want. Do you expect them to hunt down a game disk that's no longer being produced and being sold on eBay over MSRP?
The right answer is you take as much advantage of the free publicity you're going to get from HBO advertising the show to sell potential new customers your product. You could be walking down a Target/Walmart isle and see a poster for the new show you started watch. If you're impulsive enough, you'd walk out of that store with the game and new PS5 on hand.
People forget how much money is spend on advertisement. Days Gone 1 had 8 million dollars spent on advertisement alone. TLoU could easily have 20-30 Million dollars in advertisement alone, again would be silly of them to not take advantage of that.
To the loyal fans of course it does. Though its just the world we live in, business have to make choices that sometimes aren't the best for their costumers but best to their bottom line.
Yeah I agree on some of your points, however putting ND on a remake of a recent game, means if they do it to their standard, it will impact how many games they can release on the PS5. Even if they have 2 teams, those 2 teams could both be making new PS5 exclusives, as opposed to one exclusive and one remake
At a time where their main rivals are mopping up studios and gaining tons of exclusives, it just seems weird to reduce the amount of exclusive content you can produce to try and get some non gamers to buy a PS5 thanks to being fans of a TV show
MS already tried to get non gamers on board with the original XB1 and it didn't work. The vast majority of people under 40 already play games, so I just can't see the audience for a TLOU TV show (the main demo probably being people under 40) bringing to Sony millions of people who don't already play games
I'm sure they have internal reports and numbers that show it is a good move, and after all, I'm just a random guy online who likes video games, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. I managed to call the OG XB1 and Stadia being massive flops and I (along with a lot of people on old GAF/Era) were dead right there, and that's not because we're genius', it's because it was obvious they were bad ideas. Remaking TLOU to serve a TV show just sees as obvious a bad idea to me. That said, I may be wrong, and I have been wrong in the past, so really only time will tell
I know Era is a bubble but even on Era, only 16.1% of the almost 2,000 people polled are really interested in a remake