Nowadays, there are fewer third-party exclusives, so platform owners like Sony must come up with clever strategies to draw players into their ecosystem. One executive claims that this can be accomplished by elevating the PlayStation gaming platform.

There is still room for exclusives where it makes sense, Shawne Benson, head of third-party portfolio and acquisitions, said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “Really the focus, especially with a digital distribution model that is more prevalent than in generations past, is that there are different types of gameplay out there,” he added.

A one-size-fits-all strategy won’t work for everything because the variety of gaming experiences accessible to players is expanding along with the industry. For instance, a free-to-play game’s economic model is most successful when it is available on as many platforms as is practical and draws the largest audience possible, according to Benson.

Benson claims that, when the opportunity arises, making the PlayStation version of a game stand out as the finest is more crucial than any exclusivity agreement and can be done by skillfully utilizing current technology. Benson posits the query, “What kind of innovation can they implement using the adaptive triggers or the haptics in the DualSense? What could they accomplish with 3D audio in terms of a game’s sound design, etc.? Hence, there are numerous things we could do and then base marketing narratives on, and some of these collaborations for multiplatform games really center on that.”

As Benson puts it, “we definitely are still in this ‘raising tide helps all ships’ mindset for the VR ecosystem, so it’s not the same kind of competitive landscape as it is, say, in the console space, a kind of ‘flat’ gaming experience.” As a result, the situation is a little different for the company’s most recent technological innovation, the excellent PSVR2.

As Benson notes, “it’s around how we can best support you to be able to bring that content over to PSVR 2, and that can be development funding support or marketing support because a lot of these studios don’t necessarily have the same kind of marketing infrastructure as a bigger publisher would.” Instead, Sony wants to support PSVR2 by maintaining the development community and helping studios that want to bring their titles to the platform.

Last but not least, Benson talks about PC. He says, “From my point of view, it’s really important for gamers to have choice and variety in places to play, and PC is really not in the same kind of competitive space for us, at least right now,” but that could change.

Do you concur with Benson’s approach, according to which an exclusivity arrangement is less effective than making the PlayStation the finest platform for playing third-party games?