Sony Wants to Make PlayStation the Best Place to Play Third-Party Games | Push Square
Third-party exclusives are becoming less common these days, which means platform holders like Sony need to find savvy ways to entice players into their ecosystem. This can be done, one exec says, by making PlayStation the best place to play.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, head of third-party portfolio and acquisitions Shawne Benson discusses some of the reasons why such arrangements are less common nowadays and said, «there's room for exclusives where it makes sense, obviously, but really the focus – especially with a digital distribution model that is more prevalent than in generations past – is that there are different types of gameplay out there.»
As the industry grows, so too does the breadth of experiences available to the gamer, and a one-size-fits-all approach won't work for everything. Benson explains, «for example, a free-to-play game's business model is most successful when it's on as many platforms as possible and brings the biggest audience possible.»
Still, when the opportunity arrives, Benson says that what is more important than any exclusivity deal is making the PlayStation version of a game stand out as being the best, and this can be achieved through the skilful application of existing tech. Benson asks the question, «what kind of innovation can they apply with the haptics in the DualSense or the adaptive triggers? What could they do with 3D audio in the sound design of a game, etc? So there's a lot of things we could do and then create marketing stories around, and that's where some of these partnerships for multiplatform games really focus.»
The situation is a bit different for the firm's most recent piece of tech, the excellent PSVR2, because, as Benson describes it, «we definitely are still
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