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Sony (NYSE: SNE, initial buy $13.64), held its second annual PlayStation Experience event in San Francisco over the weekend and wow, judging from the sizzle reels shown, 2016 is shaping up to be an exciting one for gamers! This bodes well for Sony, as there looks to be plenty of content and new hardware that video game fans will be more than happy to plunk down their cold hard cash for.
Today we will briefly cover off on some of the highlights from the upcoming games for the fast-selling PlayStation 4 (PS4) console and next time we will cover off on Sony’s new piece of kit – the PlayStation VR – that we think will help position Sony to be at the forefront of the VR market opportunity as it goes primetime.
The PlayStation Experience started off with a keynote that provided some incredible footage of upcoming games that will have gamers psyched up for next year.
That’s no easy feat considering 2015 had its own set of bumper games, with the likes of Activision Blizzard’s (NASDAQ: ATVI, initial buy $20.61) Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (winner of the best shooter category at the Games Awards), Destiny: The Taken King and Skylanders: SuperChargers; as well as the hugely anticipated Fallout 4 (Bethesda) and the winner of the game of the year at the Games Awards, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt RED).
Sony’s keynote started off with the return of intrepid explorer Nathan Drake in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. The franchise has been a big seller for PlayStation and the new game is due out 18 March 2016, with it being unveiled at the event that the action game will have a branching dialogue tree, improving re-playability for story mode. The beta is now live, but only for those who stumped up for Uncharted: The Nathan Drake collection.
In one of the cinematic sequences shown at the weekend event, Drake comes up against a new female character that screams femme fatale (be careful Nathan…) with what sounded to us to be a distinctively Aussie twang!
Fans of the epic Final Fantasy franchise got good news in that the Final Fantasy VII remake was released for PS4 and Square Enix (a Japan origin studio) have again impressed with their artwork.
This is the first in the series to use 3D fully rendered characters on pre-rendered backgrounds and it looks very cool. The RPG franchise has a huge fan base, with the first game released back in 1987 and over 100 million cumulative sales of games in the series!
There was a bunch of other great trailers spanning different genres such as RPG, action, sports, strategy and platformer’s just to name a few. It pretty much seemed there was something for everyone, with an interest in video games, at the weekend event.
As the PS4 has established a firm lead in the current console battle, developers are likely to focus on getting their product optimised for PlayStation first and that should support a virtuous cycle of sales for the game and network services segment…
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