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

[TheMisterManGuy]

curl-6 said:

Wman1996 said:

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.

They may not have needed it per-sae, but that doesn't mean they didn't have it. At the time of the PS2, Sony had more than a dozen internal studios for games.

Japan Studio (Which at the time was just 4 product development departments within Sony Computer Entertainment Japan)

Polyphony Digital 

Foster City Studio

  - Naughty Dog 

  - SCEA Bend

Santa Monica Studio 

  - Incog Entertainment 

San Diego Studio 

  - 989 Sports

London Studio 

  - Team Soho

Cambridge Studio 

Studio Liverpool 

  - XDev

A pretty large development operation for a console that allegedly didn't need first party development.

Last edited by TheMisterManGuy - on 28 December 2025