PS5 Exclusives Remain Important, but PlayStation Is Focusing Mainly on Third-Party Games
In an interview with The Game Business, PlayStation vice president of strategic initiatives and third-party content Christian Svensson explained that the company’s strategy has always depended heavily on games made by external studios, from major series like GTA and Call of Duty to smaller partners.
According to Svensson, “PlayStation is just a plastic box without content,” and most of that content comes from third-party developers. Because of this, Sony plans to continue investing strongly in that area while also trying to bring in new partners from countries like China and South Korea.
Third-Party Games Remain the Core of the PS5 Strategy
Svensson said, “If you look at PlayStation’s history, from the beginning we’ve been a very third-party focused ecosystem. If you talk to [SIE CEO] Nishino-san, who has a very product-led background, he’ll say, ‘PlayStation is just a plastic box without content.’ And third-parties are the lion’s share of the content. So, it is critical that we continue to lean in and drive, and be ambitious and bring new voices to the platform.”
He also added, “If we ever stop doing that, the industry will stop growing. We have, as an industry leader, a responsibility to continue to drive and push and to grow the whole industry, not just our own business.”
Even so, this does not reduce the importance of PlayStation Studios. Sony explained that first-party games are still needed to set the quality level for the PS5 ecosystem. Internal studios also help create technologies and tools that can later be shared with outside developers.
Svensson said, “We do have some beta, first-party functionality that is being built on behalf of the first-party side and is really going to trickle out and become increasingly available to our third-parties on a selective basis. But more often than not it goes the other way: we’re building things for third-party which first-party will be able to take advantage of.”
He also mentioned that Sony is currently working on a few projects that cannot yet be discussed publicly but could become important examples for the industry in the future.
