I like just how candid the head of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuehei Yoshida, is. Last year, he admitted to not understanding fully all the reasons behind the PlayStation 4’s incredible success. It appears that he still does not- at the very least, he seems to find the inverse correlation between a strong first party lineup and the success of a games platform “ironic.”
“[PS4’s success is] ironic in a sense, when a platform’s doing really well, studio side kind of struggles. It probably has some relationship to these two things,” said Yoshida, in an interview with Eurogamer. “When a platform’s doing well, third-parties support it more. So from a pure software standpoint, there’ll be more competition. When the platform’s not doing so well, our games become more prominent, and we get larger market share within the same platform. Because we continue to support the PS3, in the launch year of the PS4 we had The Last of Us and Gran Turismo 6 and Beyond and so on, many games, we were still working hard. We’re just head-down, focussed on delivering the games for the near future. We’re happy with how it’s going, and we’re excited about welcoming PlayStation VR. From a delivering games standpoint, we have work to do. People constantly ask us for the big exclusive triple-A games.”
It does sound like Sony have a nice lineup gestating for next year- The Last Guardian, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, and Horizon: Zero Dawn are all coming up next year. Still, one does need to wonder if Sony could not have handled the transition from PS3 to PS4 a little better- Microsoft was (and still is) supporting the Xbox 360 through to the end, but they do not seem to have had much trouble in getting a lineup of games ready for the Xbox One.