Sony's newly appointed Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida (who replaces Phil Harrison, now at Atari) understands it's becoming a tougher market for third party developers, as games development goes bigger and beefier with the current generation of consoles. Yoshida astutely surmises that multiplatform games development for major titles will become increasingly attractive for third parties, in order to maximize profitability of their IPs.

This being the case, Yoshida stresses the increasing importance of first-party exclusives for Sony's console platforms in order to make them stand out. Speaking in an interview with Sony's "semi-official" Three Speech blog:

"My role is to run first-party development, and we are always exclusive. Because, in this generation, it costs much more to develop one product, it’s just natural for third-party publishers trying to recoup the investment from multiple platforms. I think that’s pure economic pressure, pushing most of the third parties to move from some exclusive titles to more multi-platform titles. Because we know that is the trend, we, as a company, can invest in our first-party studios; in terms of exclusive titles, our role becomes more important.

"As far as I can see, with major publishers like Activision and EA, their major titles will be day-and-date with the Xbox 360 and their quality will be really good. And some of the titles, I expect, will have something extra because of the PS3’s abilities and the space on the Blu-ray format."

The comment about publishers making sure they at least make the announced Xbox 360 street dates is interesting, akin to an acknowledgement of the continuing competition provided by Microsoft's console in the mainstream market.

Yoshida points towards LittleBigPlanet as a key example of a headline exclusive, and he's definitely pumped for PlayStation Home. He also believes gameplay will finally start to see some of the next-gen refinement currently being prioritized towards high-def graphics, though the promise isn't more specific than something "unique and interesting".