Given that Shawn Layden himself has been liking posts on Twitter criticizing Jim Ryan and some of the decisions PS's been making in light of his departure, there's definitely
something going on at Sony WRT some internal politics. I mean, there's just too many little nuggets that start to add up:
>Shawn Layden's sudden, abrupt departure
>Bloomberg reports over struggle between American and Japanese sides over PS5 specifications (RAM module speeds as one example)
>Closure of Japan Studio
>The "X" and "O" button swap issue in Japan
>Initial words of wanting to focus on less volume of games, bigger AAA budgets per game (Shawn Layden himself said this but I think the decision came from other powers at the company)
>Cancelling Days Gone 2 (whatever Bend's new game is will probably not be AAA, if they were not willing to fund a sequel to Days Gone)
>Remaking The Last of Us (a pretty unnecessary remake; just because there's a new show coming doesn't justify it, either. When The Witcher Netflix show came out, did Witcher 3 get a remake? No, because it was unnecessary. Same deal here.)
>Several PS teams reportedly frustrated, weary and at odds with upper management, as per Jason's article
And that's probably not all of them. It seems like for every good thing that's come through from the PlayStation division the past year or so there's been something bad to complement it, whether it be some messaging kerfuffle, some QoL oversight, questionable departures, or the such. This isn't taking away anything they've gotten right with the tailend of PS4 and the start of PS5 so far, but it does make me think in some ways they are coasting on goodwill and previous success, and maybe weren't expecting or don't want to accept that this time they have a very strong Nintendo and resurgent Microsoft to contend with, among other things.
Really the two things that give me the most pause is the supposed internal politics between the Japanese/Western sides and somewhat questionable cancellations (plus unnecessary remakes/versions/ports whatever), because both of these things are
VERY reminiscent of what happened with SEGA in the mid-1990s' and...well we see what damage that ended up causing. The Japanese and Western sides basically sabotaging one another, sacrificing certain regions for pushes in others, cancelling sequels to games that might not've necessarily moved mountains but still had fanbases and helped with brand perception, shunning legacy IP when they could be iterated on with new installments, potentially getting complacent with marquee IP (only compilations and divisive racing games on Saturn for Sonic, TLOU remake for PS5 when the original (specifically PS4 Remaster) is perfectly playable still), etc.
I'm only saying these are
rough equivalents and have different weights between the two, but the parallels
ARE there, and we know how that impacted SEGA, who ironically went directly after Sony despite the latter having way more resources and money to play with. Is Sony heading down a similar path? It depends. First, we don't really know what their plans are for their legacy IP, they could certainly fund smaller ventures of new installments for them with external developers, like how SEGA's done for both Sonic Mania and Streets of Rage 4. And honestly, I'd like that a lot.
However, beyond that is where it starts to get a little scary. Sony
can't compete with Microsoft on their own turf in the same way SEGA couldn't compete with Sony, and in both cases for the same reason:
money. That's why I
DON'T think Sony funding their own GamePass-like service or trying to significantly expand their streaming services is going to work out well for them; that type of stuff costs significant amounts of money, not just for building the infrastructure but also in securing the deals, especially in the beginning. Microsoft has a massive lead on Sony here and have the corporate size & structure (as well as larger revenues/profits from other divisions of the company) to weather initial losses; Sony doesn't. That's what laying down the serious investments and pushes since almost five years ago helps get you.
IMO Sony has to do what Nintendo did in the mid '90s:
find a niche and solidify the hell out of it. However, the question is if Sony's choosing the
right niche to focus on. IMO, they
aren't. Yes, they make arguably the best single-player, story-driven cinematic games in the industry, but how viable is that segment going to remain as ambitions and budgets continue to increase? How many more sales are they honestly expecting from these types of games vs. what they managed on PS4, without turning to other revenue streams to get those profits (PC, mobile streaming etc., heavy MTX, etc.)?
If you look at what Nintendo did at that time, they focused on genuine hardware platform differentiation and games that were both wholly unique to their system design and financially manageable, with not too much genuine competition from other developers. For N64, that was
native 4-player multiplayer and
3D platformers as that was a genre very new at the time and one only Nintendo (and Rare) seemingly fully understood in those early years. Now let's look at PS5: yes some people would probably say Sony's equivalents are the SSD and those cinematic single-player games but....are they
really?
We've heard a lot about the SSD but I'm still of the opinion that ultimately, there's not much difference in practice between theirs and Microsoft's solution; two different solutions that take some divergent approaches to solving similar problems, it happens in tech all the time. Now in terms of the cinematic, single-player, third-person action/adventure Hollywood-style AAA, there's probably an argument certainly that Sony retains the lead on those games but, ultimately, managing budgets is going to be the biggest choke point with that type of game. Sony's answer is to make less of them but increase the budget for each, however this can have an inverse effect of
sanitizing both story and gameplay elements in these games due to want of incurring less risks that could be "misunderstood" by the mainstream, and could therein affect profits directly. These kind of games were already not necessarily super-innovative to begin with, but Sony's answer to the budget problem could potentially result in tamer experiences (that TLOU remake news doesn't instill any confidence there, either).
So if those aren't Sony's points of differentiation, what are they:
IMO, it should be VR and doing in-house development for a wider net of software that really pushes the tech and that side of the medium forward. They already have a lot of experience and work in VR, and could carve a niche for themselves as being the company that can put some real budget behind bigger-scale, ambitious, innovative VR games. Maybe they start with gradual steps, but I think it is something they could absolutely try if they make VR a standard default with the next PlayStation because, ultimately, it's the market fracturing that prevents support for VR at more levels from various developers and publishers. One of the platform holders needs to try making VR standard the way Nintendo made analog sticks standard, or Microsoft with hard drives, and for VR I think the best suitor is Sony. But that means it can't be an optional peripheral anymore (except if you want to get more headsets to use).
I think
one of Sony's other niches would be making new types of interactive content: not games per se, but say movies where you can actually interact with parts of the scene, like taking on the role of an extra or adjust the lighting of some background prop enough times and if so maybe trigger an alternate scene. Something like more natural QTE interactions, think like in games such as Detroit: Become Human, but the actual scene is still playing out as normal and the player may or may not have active control of a central character. This could be done in a way to not ruin the flow of the original vision, but add to it, and maybe by having those interactions viewers accrue points that can carry over to other things. Sony's in a better position to do this vs. a company like Microsoft or Nintendo, because they already have their own game devs alongside a television and film division, all in-house. If they really wanted to they could push for it in a way to differentiate their films from others, and backend those benefits to the games.
One thing's clear: if there is internal politics causing some strife between certain parts of the gaming division at Sony, they don't have a lot of time to rectify that. They can't afford to have PlayStation contract severely, and I don't want to see what happened to SEGA happen to Sony. Anyone trying to say this is fearmongering or paranoia, or that it could never happen, don't know enough about the history of the corporations in the tech industry. But for now all I'm doing is speculating based on the evidence and clues before us; I think by the time Sony do their E3-like show and towards the start of Fall, we'll have a good picture of what direction they're truly moving in when it comes to PlayStation.
Only after that time can we truly know if they're on a good path or a bad one, so until then I would say any overt doom-and-glooming is hyperbolic and unnecessary. However, we do have to acknowledge some of the shakiness that's come about the past year or two, how it might start to add up and suggest a particular direction, and realize that a less-than-optimal outcome
IS possible here. But is it even modestly probable? At this point in time, I'm gonna say no.