We're old men who grew up with the old Playstation of the 90s-00s, that had tons of janky & fun games, and which has been entirely replaced by the californian/hollywood Playstation
The older games like Ape Escape were considered AAA back in the day as was Spyro and Crash bandicoot.
Them being janky was due to the fact that 3d was essentially new and they were not cheap to develop for either because a lot of stuff was uncharted territory. The games back then had fully voiced cutscenes which was also a big deal because consoles didn't do voice work for the vast majority and that was still something that was primarily on the realm of the PC.
Most first party playstation games were really met with overall disdain, the PS2 god of War games were not looked upon fondly when they were first released due to the fact that they were not like Zelda or anything like Nintendo's first party games, Little Big Planet was viewed as an attempt to make a mario game and falling short, Killzone was knockoff halo, really the first big breakthrough of a game that was entirely internally developed game was Shadow of Colossus.
Now with the PS3, Naughty Dog built up their reputation with Crash Jak, but many of the complains was that the original was too much of a mario clone and the second and third tried to copy GTA. You had uncharted 1-3 on the PS3 which were of varying quality and the uncharted series was not really fondly looked upon at release either due to complains that it wasn't really a game. Because again people would made direct comparisons to what Nintendo was offering. Towards the end of the system they made TLOU which started to solidify the third person games from a mechanics perspective. PS3 was the weakest playstation was ever been so a game generating any type of good reception that was also an exclusive was pretty major
Now most of these games just did enough to warrant a sequel. Sony also tried other things like copying monster hunter when they couldn't get it on their systems and those fell short.
So come the PS4 they're reorganizing their studios and they started to pump money into more internal development. Horizon was the first big deal release because not only did it come right before Zelda BOTW, it also did comparative sales to what most Zelda installments did and this was a new IP based on no pre-existing media, they followed that up with God of War which was the game that solidified everything that was established on the PS3. They gave the player freedom to explore, while having huge set piece and trying to go for the cinematic feel that previous games could not. This was then followed up by Spiderman which again was a huge success so much so that they outright bought Insomniac afterwards. These all things that Nintendo was not really offering and finally gave sony a sense of identity for it's first party titles as being something unique rather than poor attempts at carbon copy clones.
Also the American branch was the one that saved the PS3 from being a larger failure and mitigated most of the damage. They designed all future hardware revisions, the PS4 and it's revisions, and the PS5. In turn that gave them grater input. There's yet to be any other console that's been rescued like that from such a poor opening to going on to sell around 90 million.
They're currently fixated on growing their IPs that they've now established and are adding new ones to their ranks. This is all being done to their main parent company who have now really involved themselves with playstation more than they've done previous. It's not california running the show, because Yoshida wants to turn the whole company towards IP growth.
wccftech.com