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Sony has long been a titan in the video game industry, riding high on the success of the PlayStation brand since its inception in the mid-90s.
But recently, Sony took a PR rollercoaster ride of public humiliation, astonishing redemption, and unforced self-immolation. 
It’s rather an understatement to say that Sony has had its ups and downs lately. First, they had to cancel Concord after pretty much everyone hated it. Aside from the 2016-era vritue signaling, the game committed the one unforgivable sin of being boring. Honestly, pulling the plug showed rare humility and prudence on Sony’s part.
Author David V. Stewart has the full autopsy on Concord if you’re interested. You can watch it here:
But just when Sony seemed to be on the defensive, it turned the tables by releasing an exclusive new platformer that immediately delighted players. The game, titled Astro Bot, showcased the kind of creativity that hearkened back to Sony’s Crash Bandicoot salad days. Players and critics alike praised the game’s design, with Game of the Year predictions flying fast and thick.
This resurgence in goodwill managed the daunting feat of diverting attention from the Concord debacle. But then Sony snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The announcement of the PS5 Pro, a more powerful version of the PlayStation 5, was met with initial excitement. But the fanfare faded as more details emerged.
Sony was offering a digital-only console.
For $700.
The announcement gave Millennial and older gamers flashbacks to 2006.
The immediate and overwhelming backlash made Sony look terminally out of touch.
Sure, digital has its adopters. But escalating censorship and privacy violation hijinks have created a growing number of gamers who don’t trust digital media. Much less are they willing to pay more for the extra risk.
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Sony’s whipsawing between bigs losses and big wins will make it interesting to see how they handle the PS5 Pro mess. To be frank, the company never cared that much about gaming. When Ken Kutaragi approached corporate with the idea for the PS1, they banished him to the music division to cobble together a game console from synth and Discman parts.
And as my patrons pointed out, much of Sony Computer Entertainment’s success over the past 30 years has been due to luck. Sega’s botched Saturn launch and Nintendo’s miscalculation with the N64 left the field to the PS1. The PS2 got a head start from its predecessor’s momentum, bolstered by one of the most cost-effective DVD players then on the market. The PS3 was their last legitimately good console, but the PS4 got a reprieve thanks to Microsoft repeating Sega’s (and Sony’s mistakes).
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Now Sony finds itself at a crossroads. Keep pushing expensive digital-only consoles and risk alienating half their player base? Or backtrack and show they’re willing to listen? Sony had better figure it out, and fast. Otherwise, upstarts like Valve and the invincible Big N might send them down the way of Sega.
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Also it should be mentioned, last gen they shuttered their entire Japanese development side and just recently they put out a lament that they have no more classic IPs to pull from. Perhaps if they wouldn’t have thrown them out every generation since the PS1, something Nintendo never did and has been clearly rewarded for, things might be different.
The last Sony system I bought was the PS3 (no, it was not for $599 US dollars, I got it for about a third of that) which I still use as a Blu-ray and DVD player. And it seems like I haven’t missed much.
The problem is that gaming consoles are very rapidly losing their main function. Something as simply as the Switch or the Steam Deck shows that customers no longer want more better graphics and shinier realism. They want games. I don’t think Sony realizes that anymore, if they ever realized that in the first place.
Wait. They did what?
Yeah, they moved to California and closed down their Japanese dev teams. Now all they have is their western slop.
“They moved *to* California …”
I know those words. But the order they’re in makes no sense.
I got a Playstation 2 for Christmas 2001, when I was thirteen. I still think it’s one of the greatest consoles ever made. By the time the PS2 really got rolling, game devs had actually figured out how to make 3D console games that felt good, and the best games are still enjoyable today. It had such a massive library of great games, that you could probably just play the PS2 for the rest of your life and never run out of good stuff to play.
The PS4 was also quite good, I haven’t played mine in quite a while but it too has a large library of quality games and works well as an all-purpose multimedia device. I don’t know why I’d ever bother with a PS5 as the PS4 has a huge supply of great games I haven’t played yet, and the graphics still look fine. It’s not a coincidence that both the PS2 and PS4 had such long lifecycles.
At least Nintendo with their Switch know not to mess with a good thing for the sake of New Product.
My experience with the PS2 is similar. I got it the exact same day you did. That same chunky console is still right here next to me, and it’s the newest console I own.
“But escalating censorship and privacy violation hijinks have created a growing number of gamers who don’t trust digital media. Much less are they willing to pay more for the extra risk.”
The appeal of the Internet to me, and I think for many, is the ability to say what you want to say on it. I know most gamers who are use the Internet for harmless chat. It’s not PC chatter, however, and that’s the problem.
Corporate America wants the Internet to be the mechanism by which it extracts monthly fees from the world’s wallet and nothing else. They don’t want to deal with physical media, or actual deadlines around physical media or anything else that sounds like real work. That paranoid, over the top censorship might create situation where gamers/movies fans/etc are asking how this is easier or better for them over the Internet is clearly not coming up in the discussion.
If Nintendo’s marketing team is at all competent, they will make their own version of Sony’s “how to share games on PS4” (vs. the original plans for the Xbox One) updated for the Switch vs. PS5 Pro.
On another note, the 25th anniversary of the Dreamcast’s release was two days ago. If you compare the hype for the innovations of the Dreamcast vs. the hype that Sony is trying to get for its new console, the reality of Gaming Ground Zero couldn’t be more obvious.
It’s also instructive to note that the major reason that the Dreamcast lost the war for the sixth generation is that people didn’t think that it had good enough exclusives compared to the other consoles. But compare the Dreamcast’s library to that of the PS5. And the PS5 Pro has even less of a pull than that.
The way I heard it, the Dreamcast’s real problem was that it simply had the bad fortune of being released hardly a year before the PS2. Very few people were willing to spend money on it rather than wait a year for the successor to the most successful console of all time. The Dreamcast is a classic case of something that failed, not because of a lack of merit, but due to being placed up against an unstoppable juggernaut that it never had a realistic chance of beating, regardless of which was the better console.
Sega always did overestimate the importance of first mover advantage. It can build momentum, but it’s not the unstoppable trump card they thought it was.
Back in my youth, “Playstation” was practically a synonym with “games console” (my parents and most of my friends’ parents used it exactly this way). I haven’t owned an actual console since the PS3, and it seems like I haven’t missed much.