I find it funny how Sony are getting rid of their japanese development studios (despite those being responsible partially for good console sales even if some didn't sell super well...usually due to awful marketing), but think boring cinematic borderline torture porn games are the way of the future and are putting all their eggs in that basket.
I for one AIN'T getting a PS5 ever at this rate then, there is no point.
Well first off, God of War Horizon, Ghosts of Tsushima, Spiderman, and Ratchet and Clank all play very differently. It's like saying mario, Kirby, metroid, and Donkey kong Country all are the same game. They're part of the same genre, but they're no carbon copies of each other.
Neil Druckman is VP of Naughty Dog and his reach doesn't extend past that. Nobody really shares his vision for games across the board, he's very much a minority.
Thirdly they only got rid of Japan Studio, took a core team to reform it around VR and the people who left have already founded external development studios.
Gravity Rush was given an Anime OAV and a huge marketing budget to promote it's sequel, nobody bought the game. Meanwhile GOW 2018 and Horizon didn't have any of that and they broke the combined GR series sales records in every market.
It's not like they never gave them a chance.
Mind you internally, they consider games like Ratchet and Clank and Gravity Rush part of their third person style game genre that they wish to promote. It's a very broad brush. They've also had success in taking IPs and giving them to other developers to make games for and it's worked out well. So you don't nesscierily need Japan Studio to make another installment.
Gravity Rush's open world level design many studios can already match, Insomniac's Spiderman actually does many things that gravity Rush did. The combat needed work in both GR games and it was far from perfect. The main defining thing was the camera would always right itself wherever Kat was standing.