It’s only Monday but it’s already been a huge day for news, considering gamescom 2019’s opening ceremonies highlighted plenty of new game reveals and announcements as well as some surprise announcements outside of the show. One of those surprise announcements was that Sony had acquired Insomniac Games to officially be a first-party under the Worldwide Studios umbrella, and the acquisition prompted an interesting note that Sony’s studios could be eyeing platforms other than just PlayStation.
In an interview regarding Sony’s PlayStation exclusive strategy moving forward, Sony’s Shawn Layden committed to exclusive titles, but also hinted that some Sony studios may seek audiences beyond the shores of their own console. Bloomberg notes that this will most likely apply to “multiplayer titles designed to be played on personal computers.”
“We must support the PlayStation platform—that is nonnegotiable. That said, you will see in the future some titles coming out of my collection of studios which may need to lean into a wider installed base.” Layden’s wording here is interesting. He definitively states that we “will see future titles” from Sony studios that “may need to lean into a wider install base.” It sounds like the strategy here may not be fully ironed out, but with crossplay becoming a more and more popular feature in modern games and Microsoft cozying up to Nintendo (and PC), it wouldn’t be surprising to see Sony adopt a similar tack.
Apart from Sony’s end-of-generation releases coming up, we don’t know a lot about what the future of PlayStation holds. 2020 largely remains an unknown at this point as Sony plays it quiet ahead of the expected next-generation reveal and release. If Sony follows a similar strategy to the PS4, we’ll probably see the PS5 announced early in the year, with a Holiday 2020 release for the new platform. At that point, Sony can finally start lifting the lid on what many of its internal studios have been up to and we may have better insight into this potential multiplatform release strategy.
[Source: Bloomberg]
