"Sony's first party wasn't good until second half of PS3" Myth or Fact?

[curl-6]

Wman1996 said:

curl-6 said:

For my own personal tastes, Sony's own output was weak prior to the PS3.

I did love stuff like Crash/Spyro on PS1 but those weren't actually developed by Sony themselves, while there was not much on the PS2 that appealed to me.

Those consoles were carried hard by third parties. 

I view it as PS1 and PS2 as so dominant largely due to emerging tech, third-party dominance and powerful branding. I feel like PS2 is the PlayStation console that needed first-party games the least because of how massive PS1 was. It beat GameCube and Xbox to market, had the legacy/backwards compatibility, and a DVD player.

PlayStation has stayed in the game from those legacies but also their first-party offerings becoming more popular. PS4 might've finished around Wii-PS1 (or even a little below) without its popular first-party games. 

Yeah the PS3 losing half their marketshare and getting beaten by the Wii (and almost the 360 too) forced Sony to invest more in big, killer first party games, and the PS4 then benefitted from the investments and strategies put in place on PS3.

Before PS3, they didn't really need strong internal output cos they had the lion's share of third party titles, many of which were exclusive to PS.