SONY UNVEILED IT NEW GAME LINE UP FOR THE YEAR

Sony on Monday announced its new game lineup for the year at the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center. We have just concluded the PlayStation E3 Press Conference for 2016 and if ever there was a year dedicated to thrilling entertainment experiences, this is it, noted Shawn Layden, president of Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Sony announced new titles not only for PlayStation 4, but also for its virtual reality brother, the PS4 VR, which will be available in North America in October. New games for the PS4 include Days Gone from the SIE Bend Studio, the newSpider-Man from Insomniac Games, God of War from SIE Santa Monica Studio,Death Stranding from Kojima Productions and Resident Evil 7 Biohazard from Capcom.

Other new offerings from SIE Worldwide Studios include Horizon Zero Dawn,Detroit: Become Human and The Last Guardian. The announcement that God of War is in the pipeline is welcome news to PS4 fans, noted Lewis Ward, research director for gaming at IDC. People have been looking forward to God of War on the PS4.

The company announced a trio of games for its VR box: Farpoint from Impulse Gear, Star Wars Battlefront: X-Wing VR Mission from Electronic Arts andBatman: Arkham VR from RockSteady and Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment. We have expected for a while that Sony will come forward with more VR titles as they approach the start of device sales in October this year," said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner.

The latest round of announcements had some titles from popular game franchises, and overall they will have a small but solid group of VR launch titles. A strong lineup of VR games will be important to the success of the PS4 VR, IDC's Ward noted. There is still some question about how strong demand will be. It depends, partly, on the strength of the final games lineup. While there are already VR products in the market, Sony has an edge over them, according to Ward.

Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are already commercially available so Sony is late to market in a relative sense, but at (US) $400, Sony's peripheral is more affordable than their competitors, and he pointed out. It also has a lot of retail muscle, so it can have millions of units in stores worldwide when it launches the PS4 VR in October, Ward added. Its competitors are still struggling to get their supply chains ironed out.

The gaming console market has been in decline in recent times, but Sony has been doing better than its major competitor Microsoft overall, Sappington said.

"Xbox has been struggling. Microsoft used to give us numbers all the time for Xbox. Over the past year, they've stopped doing that. You always know when there's trouble when they stop giving you numbers," he remarked.

Sony and Microsoft are fairly even in sales and penetration in the United States, Sony clearly outstrips Xbox worldwide, said Sappington. "Sony has done a better job of marketing ... because they're marketing their console to hard core gamers, while Microsoft has been marketing Xbox as a multimedia device as well as a console."