LOS ANGELES — Team Ico has taken around a decade to deliver the followup to its last major release, but it’s finally, really happening.
Sony announced tonight that The Last Guardian lives as part of its Electronic Entertainment Expo media presentation. Now a PlayStation 4 game, Sony resurrected the title after lengthy absences from the show over the last few years — it is coming in 2016. The last time the company had anything from the monster-wrangling to show off in public, Obama was still in his first term. And it’s a key release for Sony in the $55 billion annual console market — one that could let it make up tens of millions spent over nearly a decade of development and give gamers a reason to pick a PS4 over an Xbox One.
With The Last Guardian finally reemerging, this brings us closer to the third game from Sony’s Team Ico, which is a subgroup of its Japan Studios developer. The last time Team Ico released a new video game, it was Oct. 18, 2005. We are rapidly approaching the 10-year anniversary of that date.
This also bolsters Sony’s lineup, which has suffered from a dearth of headline-grabbing exclusives since the PlayStation 4 debuted in late 2013. PlayStation boss Andrew House even said in a recent discussion with investors that first-party releases from his teams are looking “sparse” through the end of 2015.
The company is going to want to pack its lineup as densely as possible going forward to ensure it has software to sell to the more than 20 million people who own PS4s.