Sony: ‘No plans to dial back third-party deals in 2016’

Next year looks like one of the busiest in PlayStation’s history, but Sony says the packed release schedule won’t see it move away from deals with big third-party games.

2015 has arguably been defined by Sony’s reliance on third-party partnerships with major titles such as Star Wars Battlefront, Call of Duty: Black Ops III and Destiny, to make up for a dearth of first-party big hitters. (Bloodborne, Until Dawn and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection are three notable exceptions.)

Xbox, meanwhile, has gone strong on its first-party offering, promoting Halo 5: Guardians, Rise of the Tomb Raider and the latest Forza as platform exclusives.

With PS4’s library set to become a far stronger offering in 2016 – Street Fighter V, Uncharted 4 and No Man’s Sky are all among the highly-anticipated console exclusives set for release on the machine – Sony might be forgiven for scaling back its reliance on third-party marketing deals and promotions.

But that won’t be the case, says PlayStation’s European president Jim Ryan.

We are going to be strong with games that we have developed and we will publish, but third-party partnerships will continue to be important to us,” he told MCV.

The days of a platform holder working in isolation are long-gone.

It is a connected ecosystem and relationships with publishers operate on many levels – they will certainly continue to be really important in 2016.”