I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you said, but I also think it’s incumbent on first parties to do things third parties can’t.
Games like Ico, The Last Guardian, the stuff PixelOpus made and so on, are the kinds of games that may be harder to do in a third party publisher environment but can be done in first party because the profitability of each individual game can take a back seat to adding value to the platform and ecosystem.
I think Sony’s trend towards blockbuster games will probably be fine for them in the short to mid-term. They clearly have two big audiences they want to target (AAA “cinematic” gamers and ”live service” whales) and everything else has to to be discarded, but I think they lose a bit of what makes their platform attractive by doing that.
There are dozens upon dozens of live service games coming out the game industry’s collective ass all the time, and third parties also do cinematic AAA single player games too, so Sony really has to rely on the quality of the games in those spaces rather than making PlayStation as a platform unique with odd and quirky games.
All it’d take is a few bad releases and that can have a corrosive effect on your platform. Towards the end of the Xbox 360-era we saw Microsoft lose their way and that ended badly for them because the quality sucked and nothing was unique. It was basically muddy brown online multiplayer shooters, “car wot goes fast” and Kinect. To make matters worse, quality took a nosedive.
Fast forward a decade and we’re having serious discussions about Microsoft doing a Sega and going third party.
Sony are discarding their cultivated identity in a similar way, but from a stronger position (and into spaces that are more traditionally “gamer”) so the reaction hasn’t been as…. vocal, shall we say? But their moves over the last 3-4 years make them look more like a third party than a platform holder and that’s kind of a shame.
store.steampowered.com
store now. The fact it only lasted half a year is crazy (and good).
