The difficulty in the comparison here is that it felt like in the PS2 era, Sony didn't really have to do very much to secure exclusives from major Japanese 3rd parties. By and large, the lion's share of all games Namco, Squaresoft, Konami, and others produced in that generation went exclusively to the PS2, with far less going full multiplatform, let alone to the PC.
Definitely. If anything, this adds to what I was saying. The market has changed, and the attitudes of Japanese devs & publishers have changed along with it.
PS2 was an absolute 100% must-have if you were a fan of Japanese games. So many Japanese games were on it, both mainstream and niche, from the big franchises like Ridge Racer, Time Crisis, and Tekken, to music games like Taiko no Tatsujin, Dance Dance Revolution, and beatmania IIDX, to smaller productions like Gitaroo Man, Mister Mosquito, and Chulip, not to mention their very own Japan Studio games. And of course, tons of JRPGs and SRPGs including the aforementioned Disgaea. I owned a number of these games and still do.
This continued into the PS3, perhaps only to a slightly lesser extent. I bought mine for Ridge Racer and Tekken (again), and kept it for Project DIVA, Deadstorm Pirates, and House of the Dead 4. But there were still lots of new niche games on it, too, many remaining exclusive.
You could start to see the changes in the PS4 generation. I bought mine for Shenmue III, and had to get Project DIVA Future Tone too. The latter was ported to Switch later, though not with all of its songs. Although I'm ultimately keeping my PS4 for those games as well as PSVR, there wasn't much else on it that interested me. The first-party exclusives don't appeal to me much, and anything that wasn't exclusive, I generally got on Xbox (my primary platform since 360).
Now, as a result of their new strategy, I have no interest in their current products. My Vita will remain my primary portable for now, since I already have years' worth of things to play on it and will be adding more, but once my XB1X feels old I'll just upgrade to (hopefully) a smaller, flatter revision of the Series X.
I understand that I am not a representative of the market at large, but seeing as how the PlayStation brand was built on the massive amount of variety in their exclusives, I believe it will almost certainly have some sort of negative effect on the brand moving forward.
