Yesterday it was revealed that Sony were finally buying Spider-Man developers Insomniac Games, adding the studio to the thirteen others they already own across the globe. Following the news of the acquisition Bloomberg had a interview with Shawn Layden, chairman of Sony’s game studios worldwide, who revealed that going forward first party studios may develop games for formats other than PlayStation.
“We must support the PlayStation platform — that is nonnegotiable,” Layden said. “That said, you will see in the future some titles coming out of my collection of studios which may need to lean into a wider installed base.”
Bloomberg note that these games may be “particularly multiplayer titles designed to be played on personal computers,” rather than games for rival consoles, but that could still happen.
Microsoft have also casually mentioned that their first party studios could develop games for other formats.
“The question is less binary about should it be on Switch, should it be on PlayStation, and more does it make sense for the franchise,” said Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty. “In other words, is it a kind of game where it would benefit from the network effect of being on a bunch of different platforms or is it a game where we can best support it by putting resources and making sure that our platforms, things like xCloud and Game Pass and Xbox Live, are really leaning in to support the game.”
We’re living in interesting times where boundaries are being broken. Cross platform play is now a thing, albeit in a small number of cases, band the big three, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, all former enemies, have been teaming up to fight President Trump, and Sony and Microsoft have partnered to explore cloud-based gaming solutions and AI. Microsoft now own a number of studios who released games on PlayStation, such as Hellblade developers Ninja Theory, and Insomniac dabbled with Microsoft to launch Sunset Overdrive.
Google Stadia, whilst not seen as a huge threat at present, could disrupt the console market in the future and by teaming up the big three may just have a chance at beating it.
