With the year just about over, a Sony executive has admitted that the PlayStation 4's first-party lineup for 2015 was not that strong. That's a lot easier to say with 2016 just days away, a year the executive says will be "incredible" for PlayStation 4 games.
For many of 2015's big multiplatform games, such as Call of Duy: Black Ops 3 and Star Wars Battlefront, Sony has collaborated with the game makers to bring home more content for PlayStation 4, stated Michael Ephraim, Sony Entertainment Australia's managing director.
"We have worked very closely with third parties this year because our first party lineup was not as a strong as we would have liked," Ephraim told GameSpot at a 20th Anniversary event for PlayStation in Sydney.
Some of Sony's 2015 exclusives included Bloodborne, MLB 15: The Show, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. There were a lot of indies, HD remakes and, as Ephraim mentioned, collaborations for exclusive features on third-party titles.
"Next year, our first party lineup looks incredible," Ephraim said. "You've got Street Fighter, Uncharted 4, No Man's Sky, The Last Guardian, Gran Turismo. These are all exclusives, and two of them are new franchises."
Ephraim might have said it the plainest, but he wasn't the first to acknowledge the weakness of the PlayStation 4's first-party games and exclusives. Back in May, Sony Computer Entertainment President and CEO Andrew House said the console's 2015 lineup of exclusives was "a little sparse."
"I will admit that these are, in the current publishing landscape, few and far between, but we were able to announce a full exclusive around a franchise like Street Fighter so that Street Fighter 5 is a complete exclusive for PlayStation 4," House said. "Although given publishing dynamics and development costs, those are increasingly difficult to secure."
While PlayStation 4's 2015 lineup may have been a little sparse and not that strong, the Xbox One has been enjoying what Microsoft calls the console series's greatest lineup ever.
Some of the highlights of the Xbox One's 2015 lineup include timed exclusive Rise of the Tomb Raider, Halo 5: Guardians, Forza Motorsport 6 and Ori and the Blind Forest. For 2016, there will be Quantum Break and Scalebound and others.
