Sony on first-party games

In its 2020 corporate report, Sony reiterated the importance of exclusives to its growth strategy. In fact, “SIE will accelerate the enhancement and rollout of its portfolio of exclusive PlayStation titles,” the company said.

That goes hand in hand with Sony’s commitment to “to invest in, or acquire, firms with abundant creativity and cutting-edge technologies to build up Worldwide Studios (WWS).”

Currently, there are 14 studios across the US, Europe and Japan under the WWS label, the latest addition being Insomniac Games. It joined WWS in August 2019.

Along with expanding its portfolio of exclusive content, Sony said it is willing to explore bringing its first-party titles to PC platform “to promote further growth in our profitability.”  Sony has already began to test this strategy with launching Horizon Zero Dawn on Steam and Epic Games Store on August 7.

However, it doesn’t mean that all Sony exlusives will now eventually end up on PC. It seems likely that the decision to bring any first-party IP to PC will be made on a case-by-case basis. The idea here, according to WWS head Hermen Hulst, is to “show people maybe what they’ve been missing out on.” Even if Sony has become more open-minded about its approach to user acquisition, it’s not prepared to transcend its dedicated hardware just yet.