An interesting picture is clearly emerging from Sony's 2024 PS5 lineup, which is that first parties aren't all that necessary.
When, some time ago, the new interim PlayStation CEO Hiroki Totoki stated that No first-party releases of well-known series are planned until 2025, this was taken with great disappointment by almost everyone, but we are progressively understanding what the upper echelons of Sony had in mind for this long hiatus on the part of the internal teams. Stellar Blade also confirms that the PlayStation company's strategy for this year is to rely above all on external productions, focusing strongly on third party exclusives (or “second party”, as some of these are defined) to compensate for the large gaps in the internal production of 2024, which was perhaps stuck in the famous transition towards live services, or physiologically devoid of titles ready in the short term due to releases that have occurred in the recent past.
It's nothing new, to be honest: in fact, it could be seen as a back to basics for Sony, which at the beginning of its gaming career had practically no internal team but was able to build its empire through partnerships and collaborations, trying to make its platform as attractive as possible for large third-party publishers. Although today third party exclusives are quite controversial, they were in fact a normal thing until some time ago, and they were responsible for the great success of the first PlayStations, which led to the construction of today's empire. It is therefore not surprising that Sony continues to use similar solutions, as it seems to have relaunched in a big way in this area, perhaps with even greater momentum.
A very aggressive policy
In the space of a few months, from the beginning of 2024, we saw it coming Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Stellar Blade, all titles closely linked to PS5 despite none of these being developed by PlayStation Studios. They are the result of a great work of diplomacy on the part of Sony, which also proved to be decidedly unscrupulous in going after some titles such as the latter by ShiftUp, which was initially presented as a multiplatform game and only later became a exclusive. Something which, coming from other producers, would certainly have caused more discussion than what happened in this case, in a certain sense confirming how the concept of third party exclusivity in favor of PlayStation is in a certain sense also normalized in the discussion video game.
It is a very aggressive attitude, but one that is functional for a traditionalist manufacturer like Sony, which aims above all to sell consoles, thus managing to show itself on the market with a large number of exclusives even without necessarily relying on internal productions. From this point of view, competitors have different paths to take to reach these levels of widespread organization and be able to build the network of cross-interests and partnerships that Sony is able to weave with third parties, but this is not necessarily the case the path to follow for everyone, given that others, such as Microsoft, seem to be going in the opposite direction of greater openness between platforms. It remains to be seen whether the two approaches can lead to effective coexistence between platforms, at least as long as the market continues to be based on closed hardware.
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