Interestingly enough, at its recent CES 2024 press conference, Sony showcased a few glimpses of the Gravity Rush movie. In a video showcasing its new visualization facility, Torchlight, the company showed off a couple of shots of the film, first showing a female character (who one might presume is Kat, the protagonist of the games) leaping off a skyscraper, with another shot showing her flying downward through the air towards floating island cities that are being attacked by a massive, winged monstrosity. Sandwiched between the two shots was a brief look at behind-the-scenes performance capture work. Take a look below.

Interestingly, the video showcasing Torchlight also showed glimpses of a mystery Patapon project.

Other PlayStation properties that also have adaptations in the works include Ghost of Tsushima, Days Gone, and Gravity Rush, while season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us is also in the works. Meanwhile, writing is also underway for Amazon Prime’s God of War series and Netflix’s Horizon series.

But when you spend 30 years doing anything, you’ll have some bad days and some good days, and Sony has, of course, had its share of relative disappointments and underwhelming outings to go along with its really strong ones. Here we take a look at everything it has done, and rank all of its platforms from worst to best, across consoles, handhelds, and VR.

#9. PLAYSTATION VR2

Sony’s newest hardware release has reportedly not had the kind of launch the company may have been hoping for, so it remains to be seen how it will fare in the months and years ahead. In the here and now, it’s easy to see the promise. The PS VR2 boasts excellent hardware, boasting impressive tech and some much-needed improvements over its predecessor. But though it’s still early days, its library isn’t exactly stacked full of games that justify its shockingly high price. Hopefully, Sony and others in the industry will have some really good games up their sleeves in the not-too-distant future. We wouldn’t mind a Half-Life: Alyx port.

#8. PLAYSTATION VR

Sony deserves a great deal of credit for being willing to experiment with something as niche and new as VR back in the day. Building on the incredible success of the PS4, the company decided to dip its toes in virtual reality with PS VR, and with the likes of Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Resident Evil 7, Blood and Truth, and more, the device did deliver some really good games. Of course, it also had its fair share of issues. The hardware, for instance, was quite finnicky and didn’t exactly have the best user experience. It was a decent start for Sony in the world of VR, and it does boast a solid library, but it didn’t exactly set the world on fire.

#7. PLAYSTATION VITA

Thinking about the PlayStation Vita just makes us sad. There was so much to love about Sony’s doomed handheld. It’s hardware was excellent, it had a gorgeous OLED screen (or at least the original model did), and it seemed like the perfect way to properly realize the promise of console games on the go that Sony originally made with the PSP. It was, however, a victim of a string of bad decisions by Sony, from the ridiculous pricing of its proprietary memory cards to how poorly Sony supported the device. It’s a real shame that the PS Vita bombed as horribly as it did, because if Sony had had its heart set on it, it could have done some excellent things in the handheld space. Speaking of which…

#6. PLAYSTATION PORTABLE

The PlayStation Portable launched at a time when Nintendo had an actual, literal monopoly in the handheld gaming market, before even mobile gaming was really a thing. Much like the original PlayStation, the PSP faced insurmountable odds as it sought to overturn that monopoly, and though it didn’t quite do that the way the PS1 did, it did make a significant chunk. With its slick form factor, more powerful hardware, and games that looked better than anyone had ever imagined they would on a handheld, the PSP raised the bar in ways that it doesn’t get enough credit for. It helped, of course, that it had an excellent library, which also doesn’t get the praise it deserves. God of War: Chains of Olympus, God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Daxter, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – the list goes on and on.

#5. PLAYSTATION 5

It’s very, very likely that about four or five years from now, the PlayStation 5 will be higher on this list. The fact that it’s less than three years old and is already this high is, however, testament to the incredible start it has had. Console shortages in its first couple of years aside, the PS5 has been firing on all cylinders since day one. Incredible specs, one of the best console controllers of all time, excellent user experience and features- it ticks all the boxes. Including, of course, an impressive library. With the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Demon’s Souls, Returnal, God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, and more, the PS5 has already built up a solid catalogue of excellent exclusives, and there’s obviously plenty more to come. Of course, with it still being in the early years of its life, the PS5 still has some catching up to do with all of its predecessors, but so far, it doesn’t look like it’ll fall short of expectations.

#4. PLAYSTATION 3

By the time all was said and done, the PS3 sold over 87 million units worldwide and accumulated a stellar library of games, so it’s not exactly a failure. But is it a bit of a black sheep in the PlayStation console family? I think even Sony would tell you that. How complicated its hardware was to develop for for a number of developers across the industry, the fierce competition it faced from the Xbox 360, the ridiculous price it launched for- there were plenty of reasons for why the PS3 is the only PlayStation console to sell under a hundred million units. At the same time though, it’s also got an amazing library. Sure, the PS3 era had plenty of issues, but it also delivered games like Metal Gear Solid 4, the Uncharted 2, God of War 3, Killzone 2 and 3, and so, so much more. So at the end of the day, the good definitely outweighed the bad.

#3. PLAYSTATION 

Going up against the established dominance of Nintendo and Sega (but largely the former) as a newcomer wasn’t an easy task in the slightest, but with the PlayStation, Sony certainly made it look easy. It was less powerful than the N64, sure, but it was also cheaper and easier to develop for. That meant developers flocked to it in droves and crammed its library full of smash hits, and that, in turn, drove sales at a scale that the industry had never seen before, culminating with the PS1 becoming the first console ever to sell more than 100 million units. Not only is it one of the greatest consoles of all time, it’s also one of the most influential consoles of all time.

#2. PLAYSTATION 2

Many would argue that the PS2 should be at the top of this list – and possibly every list – and even though we obviously haven’t put it in that position, we very easily could have. More so perhaps than any of its competitors, predecessors, or successors, the PS2 signifies what a gaming console is above all else, and that is thanks first and foremost to its library of games, which might just be one of the greatest gaming lineups of all time. It’s the highest selling console of all time and remains the only console to date to have sold over 150 million units, but as staggering as that achievement it is, it’s hard to say that it isn’t justified by every metric.

#1. PLAYSTATION 4

After a bit of a stumble with the PS3 (albeit a stumble with caveats of success), Sony decided to pivot with the PS4 in more ways than one, from its reasonable launch pricing to its quick and easy user experience to its developer-friendly hardware, and all of those decisions paid dividends for Sony. What really elevated the PS4 as a console, however, was the sudden and aggressive improvements that we saw from PlayStation’s first party offerings. Don’t get us wrong, Sony’s first party has always been one of its strong suits, but in the PS4 era, it hit completely new heights. Bloodborne, which was technically a first party release, kicked it off in 2015, and then it was just a steady stream of stellar, must-play releases. Uncharted 4, Horizon Zero Dawn, Marvel’s Spider-Man, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost of Tsushima. With first parties and third parties both firing on all cylinders, the PS4 accumulated an incredible library of games over the course of its life, and of course, is still continuing to see consistent releases in the early years of its successor’s life. For our money, it would be silly not to recognize it as one of the greatest gaming consoles of all time.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

On some level, this does make sense – in spite of the general certainty around VR being the next great tech paradigm for not just video games, but computing as a whole (remember, Facebook rebranded itself into a VR oriented company at the height of its powers and prominence, and even companies like Apple were looking into investing in the format), it just never quite caught traction the way you might expect. Meta Quest 2 (née Oculus Quest 2) has certainly done well for itself, selling almost 15 million units globally, and becoming the de facto VR platform for a mainstream audience. But that’s essentially the level of success we are talking about here – the bestselling VR system has sold 15 million. The others? Much, much less than that (given that Meta Quest 2 is the dominant VR platform after all).

Sony’s own original entry into the VR market was the PSVR, and it sold… actually fairly well, with 5 million units sold globally. Now, in a vacuum and in the immediate context of the discussion, those numbers aren’t quite so bad, are they? The PSVR sold a third of the dominant VR platform, and selling 5 million of anything is hardly anything to scoff at. But business decisions, especially financial ones, are never made in a vacuum, and in the broader context, the PSVR’s performance starts to look less impressive, and raises the question of why a follow-up exists at all – and certainly, why in the state it does (we’ll get to this bit shortly).

Just as a reference, the PlayStation 4 sold roughly 115 million units worldwide, meaning that very literally less than 1 in 20 of PS4 owners were willing to buy the PSVR. This, by the way, was in spite of heavy discounts, great bundling, and some not insignificant software support. At the peak of the PSVR’s life cycle, you could buy one for $200, and it would come bundled with some amazing games, such as Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, Iron Man, Gran Turismo Sport… and sometimes even multiple games.

This was also at the peak of VR hype. You know how I alluded to that period where the entire tech world was convinced that VR would be the next step, and there was a lot of optimism and enthusiasm surrounding the format? PSVR came right at the crest of that wave, and rode it to garner a lot of attention, support, and interest. Remember, major third parties were all announcing some fairly big name PSVR projects. Remember when every developer or publisher would have at least some VR project (even if not a full fledged game) planned? And remember how almost all of them hit the PSVR?

That was the market the PSVR launched in, those were the circumstances going in its favor. And with all of that, it managed to sell 5 million units globally.

5 million! That’s a pittance. You know what sold more than 5 million? Very literally every other PlayStation platform ever. This isn’t exaggeration! The original PlayStation sold over 100 million, the PS2 sold over 150 million, the PS3 sold over 80 million, the PS5 is already north of 30 million; the PSP sold over 80 million, even the PS Vita, the one and only real failure the PlayStation brand has had, is estimated to have sold 13-15 million units worldwide (as in, very literally three times as much as PSVR managed).

We’ll get back to the Vita in a bit, because that, after all, is central to the point that I am making here, but for a second, let’s compare the success of PSVR to other PlayStation add ons. The PS Move, for example, sold 15 million units in two years. The EyeToy? 10.5 million units in five years. The PocketStation, which was a Japan-only portable add-on for the PlayStation, sold 5 million units, and that was exclusive to one market.

So even with everything going its way, the PSVR didn’t do too well, and that’s actually not the platform’s fault, the issue appears to be that for the broader public, VR simply is not appealing enough to sell in anything remotely resembling mainstream numbers. So why, then, did Sony persist in sticking with this segment at all? Why, after PSVR, and after seeing the state of the broader VR market, did Sony decide to do a PSVR2?

I don’t ask this question out of spite, but out of consideration for some very basic and straightforward logistics that Sony themselves admitted to back in 2013-14, when the Vita was floundering after being all but abandoned by them. Sony, back then, admitted that supporting two platforms was an increasingly difficult endeavor, that maintaining two distinct development pipelines, with their own distinct set of services and games, was challenging in an era of resource intensive game development. This explanation rang true! It made total sense!

As games become more and more time and resource intensive to develop, supporting multiple systems at a time becomes increasingly difficult, and so Sony wisely made the decision to focus on their core competences, as well as the market where the bulk of their audience lies – high end home consoles. It’s the exact same problem Nintendo faced in the early 2010s, which led to the infamous struggles of the Wii U and 3DS, and which led Nintendo to consolidate their own pipeline and platforms into one hybrid system – once more, we’ll get back to the Switch later, but right now, the point of bringing it up is, Sony’s explanation made sense.

What didn’t make sense is Sony then deciding to… split their resources across two distinct platforms and pipelines anyway, because what do you imagine PSVR is, exactly? Its its own distinct platform, which requires games to be developed for it specifically, and unlike handheld game development, which is just pared back console development, VR game development is a whole other beast, requiring totally different tech pipelines on the development side, and an entirely different set of skills and considerations to be done properly. In other words, it is much more difficult to spread your resources across a console and a VR platform, than it is to do that across a console and a handheld.

If Sony was always going to split resources, why not just stick with the handheld market? Their decision to abandon it does make sense in context of when it was made – this was in the early 2010s. The PS Vita had face planted spectacularly, even Nintendo was struggling to get the 3DS to gain traction, and general wisdom at the time was that dedicated game portables were dead, more or less subsumed by the mobile and tablet gaming market. On the other hand, VR was a promising new frontier with the potential for what then appeared to be massive growth, and with its high tech trappings, potentially very appealing to the audience Sony had cultivated for PlayStation. Deciding to drop the handheld market in favour of the VR one at the time made total and absolute sense! No arguments there at all.

But now, when the state of the VR market, and the performance of the PSVR itself, is on hand and readily referenceable, the decision to double down on VR makes no sense at all. And they’re not just doubling down on the VR market, they are doubling down on it while also stripping away a lot of the advantages the PSVR had that helped it find the traction that it did find in the market. The cost of PSVR2, for example, is eye wateringly high, with its sticker price being at least as much as the PS5 itself in most countries, and higher in several. That sticker shock, which comes right as we are reportedly entering economic recession in years, is already an issue in and of itself, but the PSVR2 also launches in an era where the VR optimism is dead, and the bulk of the development community has decided to jump off the train.

You won’t get an EA Star Wars game with VR compatibility on PSVR2, you’re not getting a Batman Arkham VR game, you’re certainly not getting Bethesda VR games, given that Bethesda is now, you know, owned by Xbox.

Except Horizon, nothing major has been announced from PlayStation Studios! The original PSVR had either full or partial VR support for several Sony games – Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Concrete Genie, Dreams, Gran Turismo Sport, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, RIGS, Farpoint, Wipeout Omega Collection… remember all those? Games fully playable in VR, games with VR specific modes, games that were VR exclusive, you got everything.

Most of Sony’s bigger IP and developers sat PSVR out (a whole other issue that this really isn’t the place to get into), but there was still a lot. Do you want to know what the PSVR2 has announced from Sony so far? Horizon: Call of the Mountain, and Gran Turismo 7 being fully playable in VR on it. That’s it. That’s all that has been confirmed. This $550 headset is three weeks away from release, and I don’t even know what games I can expect on it from the platform holder. And while I would love to have the faith that Sony will surely support it with their best games and teams, a) they likely won’t, Sony never supports secondary platforms and hardware well (just look at how badly the Vita or even the original PSVR were treated on this front) and b) if you are asking people to buy this extremely expensive peripheral for an arguably expensive console, then you should probably give them some reassurance upfront, rather than holding your cards close to the chest.

Even games aside, the PSVR2 is doing a lot of things that seem to be going against the common recipe for “success” (such as it is) in the VR market – the current trend for VR success mandates wireless headsets. The PSVR2 is wired (though the jumble of wires and breakout boxes that the original PSVR involved have been streamlined to just one). The current trend for VR success is for standalone headsets. The PSVR2 is tethered. The current trend in the VR market is cheap headsets; the PSVR2 is $550 (on top of a $500 console, to be clear), and while, yes, the tech that it packs is amazing, and the price is actually very fair given that, and the PSVR2 is actually cheaper than the original PSVR with inflation considered, that’s not how the market approaches these things.

The average person who might have some interest in PSVR2 but be put off by the price won’t be thinking “okay, the economy is tough and my finances are tight, but it’s okay to spend $550 plus tax on the PSVR2, which has very few games announced for it right now, because the tech is great, and because with inflation considered, I am actually paying less than I would have for the PSVR back in the day.” Arguably, no real person thinks like that, that entire line of counterargument is bunk. The PSVR2 isn’t even building on the success of its own predecessor, with it not being backward compatible, and games having to be updated on an individual basis by developers before they are playable on the PSVR2.

Which now returns me to what is ultimately the point of this whole article – if Sony were going to continue splitting their resources, why did they decide to stick with VR? Again, this isn’t about the original PSVR, as I mentioned, the decision made sense at the time. But in the present day context, the VR market has been shown to be making minimal inroads, and even Sony’s own first VR product was, at most, a heavily caveated success.

You know what market isn’t dying, but thriving? Portables. The market that Sony confidently gave up for dead back in the day made a stunning resurgence off the back of the Switch, which, at 115 million consoles sold, and sales accelerating six years into its life cycle, is currently en route to becoming the highest selling system of all time. The Switch is managing this, by the way, without any price drops. It has demonstrably proven that there is a market for portables, which is something we are seeing in the smattering of imitators that have come up in its wake, the most prominent of which, the Steam Deck, is another huge success in its own right!

Let’s talk about the Steam Deck for a second. It’s a portable system with no exclusives, just the ability to play a portion of your existing library portably. It has already sold over a million units in a year. Before Valve did their fan favorite portable, though, they also did a high end VR headset, a high end VR headset that they pushed with the long awaited next Half-Life game in Half-Life: Alyx. Backed with such a high end, high caliber title from Valve, do you know how much the Valve Index sold? 149,000 units in its first year on the market. You can actually take the lifetime sales of the Index and the HTC Vive (the first VR hardware Valve worked on, albeit in collaboration with HTC) and combine them, and the Steam Deck has still outsold them in a year. With no exclusive games.

All of which is to say, there is a thriving market for portables (given that portables actually represent a real world use case for most people). You don’t have to invest in the portable market, and I can see the logic in not wanting to split your resources… but if you are already doing that, which Sony is, then why are you investing in VR over portables? What sense does that even make? What was the decision making process, not just financially, but also economically, which considers factors such as opportunity cost, which somehow led Sony to this decision?

A Sony portable could have continued subsisting on the kind of low- and mid-tier first party support Sony provided the first PSVR, and it absolutely would have had no shortage of games to play, because the Switch exists – and if you are making games for the Switch (which, see above, pretty much everyone is at this point), then why not also put them on the PS handheld? We no longer live in the era of specialized boutique hardware like the 3DS and Vita, which made multiplatform development across those two difficult.

The Switch uses standardized hardware, development tools, and development pipelines, and any Sony portable would too (in fact, the Vita was actually the first handheld to do that). Any game hitting the Switch or the Steam Deck (which, between the two of them, they cover very literally almost every new game that comes out at this point) would also hit the PS handheld, because why not? Third parties alone could carry it. It would probably not sell Switch levels, it might not even sell PSP levels. But even if it sold 30-40 million units, that would be six to eight times more than the PSVR. And, perhaps most importantly, Sony would still have maintained a meaningful presence in the consumer and development community of Japan, rather than more or less ceding that entire market to Nintendo wholesale and allowing them to encroach upon PlayStation’s territory in terms of success and software support even more.

I just cannot wrap my head around this. What was this decision making? I mean, I know what it was, it was wrong is what it was, but to watch it play out in real time is flabbergasting. Sony has decided to split their resources, and they are going with the VR market over the portable one. I appreciate VR, and I really do hope the kinks that prevent it from catching on are worked out sooner than later, so that the format can hit its full potential, but at this point it is abundantly clear that for the broader market, VR holds less  appeal.

It is an answer to a question no one is asking. To split your resources for that, versus portables, where the financial and strategic advantages would be immense in comparison, and taken on their own as well, is just mind boggling. I wish the PSVR2 well, but in the here and now, if you were to ask me about this entire sequence of decisions and events, I would say this represents some of the poorest decision making ever by Sony in their entire history in the gaming market.

May they prove me wrong.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

The publisher has also released a new gameplay trailer for the game. Check it out below.

The game puts players into the shoes of either Shiki or Takuto—a DigiDestined—and sees you embark on a quest to solve a mystery that revolves around restoring the Digital World to its natural order.

The gameplay in Digimon World: Next Order revolves around recruiting a wide variety of Digimon to help rebuild the Digital World. Players will also get to explore the Digital World and work on their bonds with their Digimon.

Digimon World: Next Order, originally released on PS Vita and PS4, will be coming to PC and Nintendo Switch on February 22. For more details, check out our review of the PS4 release.

Digimon World: Next Order puts players into the shoes of either Shiki or Takuto—a DigiDestined—and will have to embark on a quest to solve a mystery and restore the Digital World to its natural order.

Gameplay involves encountering a wide variety of Digimon and recruiting them to try and rebuild the Digital World. Players will also have to spend time exploring the Digital World, and strengthen their bonds with their Digimon. The game features a roster of over 200 Digimon to collect and befriend.

Players can pick two Digimon to accompany them on their adventures. Bonding with Digimon involves feeding and traininng them to make them more effect in battle.

For more details on Digimon World: Next Order, check out our review of the PS4 version.

Case in point, Final Fantasy 10 is continue to enjoy success. In fact, the entire Final Fantasy 10 series – which includes Final Fantasy 10, Final Fantasy 10-2, and the HD remaster collection that includes both – has now collectively sold over 20.8 million units worldwide. Square Enix has confirmed that figure to Gematsu, revealing that the games have sold an additional 6.8 million units since their collective sales were reported at 14 million units back in 2013. It’s highly likely that those sales have mostly (if not entirely) come from the remasters.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of upcoming Final Fantasy releases to look forward to as well. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion launches this Winter, with Final Fantasy 16 coming in Summer 2023, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth launching in Winter next year.

Taking recently to Twitter, Konami commemorated Metal Gear’s 35th anniversary with a post published via the series’ official page. In the same message, the company also confirmed that it is “preparing to resume sales of titles that have been temporarily suspended.” Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 aren’t explicitly named, of course, but presumably those are the games in question.

The Metal Gear franchise has been on a hiatus for a number of years, thanks not only to creator Hideo Kojima’s departure from Konami, but Konami’s own changing strategies and approach to the games industry. The last mainline game in the series was 2018’s Metal Gear Survive, which followed 2015’s Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.

Recent leaks, however, have claimed that a ground-up remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is in development at Singapore-based studio Virtuos. The LinkedIn profile of one of Virtuos’ employees has also previously mentioned an unannounced AAA remake of an action-adventure game.

1987年7月13日に発売された『METAL GEAR』シリーズは、本日35周年を迎えました。
一時販売を停止しておりますタイトルにおいて、販売再開のための準備を進めております。　#METALGEAR #MG35th pic.twitter.com/X7RL5du2qE

— メタルギア公式 (METAL GEAR) (@metalgear_jp) July 13, 2022

Unsurprisingly, it’s still continuing to do that, and recently hit another major sales landmark. The press page on Stardew Valley’s official website was recently updated, and it confirms that the game has now sold over 20 million units worldwide as of March 2022. That’s up from the 15 million sales that were announced in September last year, so clearly the game’s sales are maintaining solid momentum even now. Of its collective worldwide sales, 13 million units have been sold on PC.

Stardew Valley is available on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, PS Vita, iOS, Android, Mac, and Linux- so yeah, plenty of places to get the game on, if you really want to. Meanwhile, Barone has now shifted focus to his next game, Haunted Chocolatier, which will see you play as a chocolatier in a haunted castle in a more action RPG approach to the sim genre. Read more on that through here.

Tretton talked about how many technologies – including but not limited to PS Vita – were shuttered down early and never received the support they deserved. He explains how a new piece of tech requires massive marketing budgets and developer support dollars to entice consumers to buy into it.

“There were certainly technologies that I thought were good but just didn’t have the level of support they needed,” he said (as reported by IGN).

“So, you come up with new technology to introduce to the industry and the consumers. But do you have the marketing budget to really drive the message? Do you have the developer support dollars to incent them to develop games to support this initiative? And sometimes you would birth technology and hope that it caught on.”

Additionally, he also talked about how the company had an internal belief that the PS Vita was a great product – but it had come very late to the market. Coupled with the steady rise in popularity of smartphones, Sony thought that fans just didn’t want a dedicated gaming device anymore.

“Now that I don’t work there anymore, I think internally it was: ‘This is a great machine, it’s just too late.’ The world has shifted to portable devices that aren’t dedicated gaming machines,” he said.

“And I think PSP was incredibly successful. I loved what it did, and I thought it brought a console-like experience and brought genres to an older gamer that typically didn’t have console-like games to play on a portable platform,” he goes on to say

“But Vita was a nice machine at a time when very few people felt they needed a dedicated portable device.”

To read more on why PS Vita failed, click on through here.

PlayStation as a brand has always been dedicated to that cause. Releasing in 1995 and attempting to go up against an almost monopolistic giant of the industry in Nintendo, the PS1 had a mountain to climb right out the gate, and one of the biggest factors contributing to its thorough and history-defining victory in that race was its stellar lineup of exclusive games that, for the longest time, couldn’t be offered elsewhere. In those years, when the PlayStation first party lineup was still in its nascent years and was building the foundations for the future, a lot of those exclusive games came from partnered third party developers. Over the years, however, with each successive console generation, Sony continued to build on those foundations, and in the here and now, boasts a first party portfolio with enough strength and cache that it could easily sell millions and millions of consoles by itself.

Nabbing the support of giants like Konami and Square Enix (among several others) was one of PlayStation’s biggest victories in its first ever console generation, and with the exclusive support of major franchises like Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, and many more, the PS1 was able to enjoy unprecedented success. At the same time, in retrospect, the PS1 years proved to be a time when Sony identified key developers as teams that they could build PlayStation around for years to come. Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games, for instance, weren’t PlayStation-owned studios in the PS1 years, but with Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon respectively, they made games and characters that are, to this day, considered PlayStation icons (though Crash will soon be owned by Xbox, funnily enough).

By the time the PS2 rolled around, on top of continuing to enjoy incredible support from third party developers, many of whom continued to support PlayStation exclusively, Sony began expanding its first party portfolio as well. The aforementioned Naughty Dog, for instance, was acquired, and later on in the PS2’s life cycle, so, too, was a little Dutch studio known as Guerrilla Games, and Jak and Daxter and Killzone both became important cogs in the PlayStation machine. Santa Monica studio was established and ended up delivering God of War, a series that instantly became a platform icon, while from Sony Japan came instant classics like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Insomniac Games and Sucker Punch Productions, meanwhile, wouldn’t become Sony-owned for many more years to come, but even so, contributed significantly to the PS2’s library with multiple instalments in the iconic Ratchet and Clank and Sly Cooper franchises respectively. And, of course, you had Polyphony Digital, who released more excellent Gran Turismo games, just as they did for the PS1.

The graph was very clearly moving upward for Sony’s first party lineup, and the leaps it had taken from the PS1 to the PS2 were undeniable. That trajectory would continue with the PS3- a console that, for the most part, is considered to be something of a dip for PlayStation as a whole, but when all was said and done, still had an excellent library. That generation, of course, was the one that saw a large number of major third party exclusives deciding to go multiplatform and pledge their support to both PlayStation and Xbox, so it made sense that Sony chose to plug the holes by expanding their own output.

During the PS3 years, Sony acquired the likes of Sucker Punch, and Evolution Studios, who put out games inFamous, and MotorStorm. Guerrilla Games, meanwhile, followed up on a disappointing Killzone debut with sequels on the PS3 that saw the series finally living up to its potential, while Santa Monica Studio continued to deliver more God of War excellence. Insomniac Games, still not a first party studio, continued to make more Ratchet and Clank games, and on top of that, also put out three solid first person shooters with the Resistance trilogy.

The first party PlayStation studio that truly defined the PS3 generation, however, was Naughty Dog. After having spent two console generations working on mascot 3D platformers, the studio pivoted, and pivoted hard, going in a completely different direction with the Uncharted games. It was a gamble that paid off, especially with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves being touted as one of the greatest games of its time. Not too long after that, with The Last of Us, Naughty Dog delivered an even bigger hit, and a game that now defines the studio’s entire identity in a way that no other IP does.

And that, in retrospect, was a huge turning point for PlayStation’s first party. Its growth from generation to generation until that point had by no means been incremental, but even that impressive chart was made to look fairly flat in comparison to the sudden and massive boom it experienced after that. A lot of that was down to Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us, with those games essentially creating the template that some of Sony’s biggest successes over the next few years would be built on. In the PS4 generation, the PlayStation first party collective decided to go all in on single player narrative-driven action-adventure games, and to put it mildly, that worked out rather well.

Guerrilla Games dropped Killzone and took a huge gamble with Horizon Zero Dawn, Sucker Punch moved on from inFamous and instead dedicated itself to Ghost of Tsushima, Insomniac Games (finally joining the PlayStation family late into the PS4’s life) reduced its focus on Ratchet and Clank and pivoted to Marvel’s Spider-Man, and SIE Santa Monica completely reimagined God of War and moulded it in the image of The Last of Us. With a clear identity in place that most (if not all) of Sony’s first party games adhered to, the PS4 saw probably the best and most consistent lineup of first party exclusives any PlayStation consoles ever seen. That string of releases between 2017 and 2020 was when PlayStation’s first party portfolio, after years and years of consistent growth, finally came into its own and established itself as an industry powerhouse.

By now, Sony has recognized that that first party lineup is by far PlayStation’s biggest strength, and it’s no surprise to see it continuing to invest heavily in it. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen the acquisitions of Housemarque, Bluepoint Games, Firesprite, and Bungie, and excellent releases in the PS5’s early life like the Demon’s Souls remake, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, and Returnal have proven beyond doubt that the excellent run of form the PlayStation Studios group went on halfway through the PS4’s life was no fluke.

We are, of course, finally in a place where PlayStation boasts truly incredible first party lineups. PlayStation’s has impressively built itself up over the course of the last two and a half decades, and after years and years of struggle, has spent a ridiculous amount of money to go from zero to hundred. Whether it stands tallest is another discussion entirely – and one that will always boil down to personal preferences more than anything else – but there’s no denying that there’s a strong case to be made for PlayStation.

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