I was scrolling through Twitter earlier (refuse to call it X) and saw a games journalist had posted a tweet saying something to the effect of, it's sad that Sony are pretending that everything is fine and they're having huge success when they've cancelled all these games after the colossal failure Concord was. (Sadly, I can't find it now.)
My first thought having read this was, this is PS3 all over again. I'm sure the older members of GAF like myself will remember all the arrogant Sony memes, back when Sony thought flat screen TV's wouldn't take off and their CRT business was going to boom, when they turned down manufacturing Apple devices in favour of Vaio, when they thought WalkMan was still the future despite iPod killing it. There was a lot of mistakes made. And my second thought was that fight between Bane and Batman in the Dark Knight Rises.
And when you lack decent competition or you lead by such a margin, failure can very easily come with stupidity. Somehow, Shawn Layden and Shuhei Yoshida were replaced by Jim Ryan and Herman Hulst (who somehow got a promotion?) and there was a shift under their leadership to Games as a Service, which let's be fair, is lightning in a bottle. Complacency has set in and SIE leadership thought their shit didn't stink and that anything they fart out will be successful. I'm a huge PlayStation fan, always have been. It's my platform of choice and my only console that I own, but god fucking damn it, why does this feel like the kind of arrogance that led the PS3 to be such as disaster? When you've contributed to the destruction of a globally watched and loved gaming event like E3 to announce major things in blog posts, you're really doing an Apple. And I personally don't like this myself. At the brink of an epic failure, Sony knuckled down and remembered the core values which are that great games sell consoles. And the success train has been going since, but I'm pretty sure there have been some pretty nasty bumps on that track recently.
Cancelling these titles is going to make Sony likely lean further into exclusive game deals to bolster their line up with these titles now missing and Sony need to learn some huge lessons if they're going to continue to pursue this dream of being a dominant leader in the GaaS sector. Ignoring your fan feedback and every red flag that would indicate this game is dead on arrival *
cough cough Concord* probably is one of them. I never understood the push for GaaS to be quite honest with you, sure they can be profitable, but the investment required to see it is immense. God knows how many millions of dollars have been pissed away, many staff will be made redundant and so much time wasted that you wonder what they could have done, had the developers been able to make their own games. Personally, I prefer PlayStation from the mid 2010's. Whether you loved or hated E3, for me it was always a great event to meet up with friends and Sony had this sort of formula where you had trailers for games just about to come out, some in development and some announcements for games some way down the line. It created a nice timeline and I could plan accordingly. Now we can't even guarantee a decent yearly show or even a regular State of Play and in many cases a State of Play even worth watching as it's normally 20 minutes of shovel before for the thing we all came for.
And the sad fact is, nobody forced them to go this direction. It was their decision. But PSVR2 has been a huge failure, their GaaS venture so far has to be one of the worst on record. I hope FairGame$ and Marathon make some sort of dint because personally I think FG looks shit and Bungie clearly lost the magic a long time ago. It's just another case of suffering from success and hopefully some great lessons are learnt.
I just hope this deja vu isn't going to unfold over the next few years into a disastrous PS6 launch...
.png)
