The main problem with the title's roster is Sony's commitment to generating new IPs in order to keep interest in their properties at a heightened level. When Twisted Metal dropped off, they bailed on it and went to something else. Same thing happened to them funding Crash.
The most powerful symbols of the Playstation, at this point, are the PS1 golden age stars - Lara Croft, Solid Snake, Spyro, Crash. Kratos is up there, too, but he's a PS2 holdover, and the only one from that era who really stuck. Drake will probably stick too, just because his following is so devoted and his games are so well-liked.
In the PS1 era, Sony came into the market with the same idea that Sega and Nintendo had been operating under: a brand had to be built around a face, and that face had to have power. Crash was an answer to Mario, and Solid Snake was reframed in a way to overshadow James Bond (as ridiculous as it sounds now, Goldeneye vs. MGS arguments weren't that uncommon back in '98, just because the character filled similar niches). Cloud was held up opposite to Link. That was the image of Playstation, as the fans defined it to fans of other consoles. These faces are old and powerful symbols.
The PS2 era had less of that. One could argue that, as the games got better, the brands actually got weaker, as more and more ideas produced equally genuine but less memorable faces.
The PS3 era has done exactly that again.
It's not that Sony couldn't field really powerful faces - it's that the establishment of brands built around characters hasn't been their aim in over a decade. Their alternative is a good strategy, and it works for them, but it means that the resonance of a cast like this one is necessarily going to be lower than Smash Bros., where the audience has known so much of the cast for over twenty years.
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