Agreed. Only Xbox owners were using that rhetoric to deflect conversations about Microsoft lacking first party with reliable and credible titles.

I'm guessing the decrease in first party focus had to do with the fact that Sony more or less only had 3 super big exclusives in the PS3 era : God of War 3(4.8 physical), The Uncharted Series(6-6.7 physical) , and Little Big Planet(5.82 physical). That's not to say games like Infamous or Killzone weren't big, they were, but they were more so there to boost the Playstation 3's lackluster catalog in 2009. They did their jobs, but they weren't Uncharted, and definitely weren't Xbox or Nintendo level games. Despite this they had pretty big budgets, especially Killzone 2, my god. Consider that games like Nier, Persona 5, or Nioh sell almost as much as those games ... and it's no wonder that they focused on first party less. Thankfully the direction they're going is to do more different and creative endeavors and it's paying off, Horizon is on track to sell around 4 million physically by early August. The game will probably sell around 5-5.5 mil by the end of the year, truly great.

Like the rest of the world.

This doesn't seem like that much of a surprise to me.  Well, that's not entirely true, at least here in the states, the game was just sort of plopped on us without much marketing until the weeks AFTER it came out, so the fact that it did as well as it has is a little surpsing.  But then, it's Uncharted, of course it's gonna do well!