What's not to understand that when you're having to spend 4.85B in order to get 5B in revenue makes your business quite risky. You want to be operating on larger margins than that
As far as I'm aware the US does have free OTA TV. A quick google tells me that basic cable means the cheapest tier of cable. So maybe equivalent to a sky/cable entertainment package?
Americans often don't twig how many random american terms we brits have to learn the double meaning of and don't pipe up about. I'm not talking the well-known ones like cookies, but even things like "the ER" meaning "A&E"
Because they have almost definitely already factored in the loss from people boycotting vs the gain due to killing the resale market into their analysis. They are fully aware that some people are going to refuse to buy digital only
The unfortunate truth is that physical sales have been ever declining so the writing was on the wall
Edit: And you can't really compare the PS2 and PS5 in terms of competition. PS5 isn't just competing against other consoles, it's also competing against netflix, youtube, tiktok, any endless scrolling platform. There were much fewer options for entertainment in 2001 than there are now