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Andrew House, the president of the PlayStation business, says the company will go after more third-party exclusives for PS4 this year.
The move is designed to counter what House calls a ‘sparse’ line-up of first-party games.
When he says exclusives, he doesn’t necessarily mean complete exclusives.
We were able to announce a full exclusive around Street Fighter V,” he said during a Q&A session during the firm’s investor day. But giving publishing dynamics and development costs, that’s increasingly difficult to secure.
What we’ve sought to do is rather than seeking for complete exclusives, we have looked to publishers to really maximise the feature set of PS4 versus the competition.
He adds: We are not without partnerships that are in the area of third-party titles that are not necessarily around full exclusivity. A good example is Destiny, where although it is available on other platforms, the best place to play Destiny – and sometimes the first place to play content for Destiny – is on PlayStation.”
He believes that PS3 and PS Vita sales will continue to slide significantly, but talked up the success of PS4. He told investors that he will be bolstering the console’s network functionality and commissioning more original PlayStation non-game content, such as the recent PlayStation TV series, Powers.
He also said that this will be a year of investment for PlayStation, including support for PlayStation Now and Morpheus.
This year is the beginning of a harvest period for PS4, and it will be a year of investment. We will continue to invest in the platform architecture that underpins our platform. We will continue to invest in PlayStation Vue, we will undertake further investment into PlayStation original content, and of course we will invest strongly in PlayStation Morpheus, as we will look to launch an entire new business.”
