Sony Announces Plans to Focus on First-Party Development
Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced that it will be changing its organizational structure later this year in order to focus more on creating first-party titles.
According to a new press release from the company, it has decided that with the increasing value of video games and interactive entertainment, it has made the development and release of in-house games its top priority.
"Increasingly, the value of interactive entertainment is differentiated by the broad spectrum and depth of experiences that it provides to customers," they wrote. "As such, SIE's mission to create and develop the most attractive and powerful first party titles has become more important than ever."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
To achieve this goal, Shawn Layden, current president of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, will "concentrate his focus on WWS continuing to provide platform-defining content that helps drive the growth of SIE," starting on the first of April.
In addition to this, the various marketing and sales divisions of the American, European, and Asian branches of Sony Interactive Entertainment will report directly to Jim Ryan, deputy president and head of global sales and marketing.
It really should not come as a surprise that Sony is doubling down on its efforts to create first-party exclusives, especially considering how well the company did in that aspect over the past year.
In 2017, Sony Interactive published "Horizon Zero Dawn," one of the best-selling new titles on the platform. Even 2018 had a strong start as the recently released "Shadow of the Colossus" ended up outperforming its original by a huge margin.
Reports say that 2017 also saw Sony reach new milestones in the market as it hit the 70 million mark in terms of sales for the PlayStation 4. With numbers like these, it is easy to see why it wants to center its focus on creating quality titles for the platform.
While this shift in focus and structure will not be in effect until April, this coming year already has several new titles published by Sony that many are looking forward to and expect to make record numbers. "Spider-Man," "God of War," and "Detroit: Become Human" are all set to release early this year, and all of them are published by Sony, further adding more high-quality games to its already long list of accolades.
