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[kaizenkko]

It's funny how quickly Sony's goodwill among gamers has deteriorated. This kind of criticism used to be limited to forums and shut down immediately by fanboys as concern trolling but now it's effectively hit mainstream. I remember just a few years ago I was being called chicken little for literally pointing out where things were heading.

They are simply out of touch. Out of touch with their audience that they cultivated with IPs they no longer touch. Out of touch with the audience they cultivated by making amazing E3 shows they no longer do. Out of touch with the audience they cultivated making AAA single player games they have set aside in favor of GaaS trash they cant even seem to get out. out of touch with the audience they cultivated by releasing industry leading graphics and then launching the console with 2 years of cross gen games.

They just had a year where they launched Helldivers 2, Astro bot, FF7 Rebirth, Steller Blade, Concord, Rise of Ronin and Silent Hill 2 as exclusives and yet, their fans are still not happy. Clearly, it's not enough. Clearly they are clamoring for more. They want that KZSF style wow moment. They want an Uncharted 2 or Killzone 2 caliber game. They want an E3 like 2015. Not State of Plays.

Sony execs must ask themselves why this year of all years did not click with their fanbase. Why so many games failed to perform. But they will take the wrong lessons and simply make more helldivers 2.

What they should do:

- Restructure all studios and give them a 3 year mandate. Make games in 3 years or fuck off. If it turns out to be a 15 hour game instead of a 50 hour game then fine.
- No more safe/formulaic stuff like Ratchet, Spiderman 2, HFW and Ragnorak. You are first party. Innovate. No more copy pasta games.
- Cancel all remakes. They limit the creativity of your developers by forcing devs to stay true to the original vision and are low effort jobs that a first party should never touch.
- Cancel all GaaS games. Let good developers like ND, GGM, Insomniac make games with MP modes if they want. KZ2, Resistance, TLOU1 and Uncharted had great MP modes. No need for GaaS.

lol

It's funny how people here really think they know EVERYTHING. People here really don't seems to have any knowledge of how business works.

Sony is fine. Playstation is fine. The numbers are better than ever. Maybe not the best for hardcore fans? Sure, but they are making more money than at last gen and will not change anything because of what a few people think.

 

[TGO]

And they don't do it any more, because nobody would buy it.

Do what exactly?
there's a lot more missing then Parapper The Rapper.
Sony has done PS5 versions of PS4 games that are sequels.
Last generation Sony put out a plethora of new IP's as well as sequels to their biggest franchises
- Knack
- The Order
- Bloodborne
- Concrete Genie
- Dreams
- Death Stranding
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Days Gone
- Drive Club
- Astro Bot
- Blood & Truth
- Detroit
- Horizon
- Until Dawn
- The Last Guardian
- Marvel Spider-Man

Not all of them was hits, But still.

This generation we have....
- Returnal
- Concord
- Destruction AllStars

And everything that was announced before the PS5 release and Remasters of some of those games on PS4.
The only good thing they been doing is 3rd Party exclusives and partnerships.
But when it comes to Sony themselves, the hardware department seems to be more productive.

 

[BattleScar]

Do what exactly?
there's a lot more missing then Parapper The Rapper.
Sony has done PS5 versions of PS4 games that are sequels.
Last generation Sony put out a plethora of new IP's as well as sequels to their biggest franchises
- Knack
- The Order
- Bloodborne
- Concrete Genie
- Dreams
- Death Stranding
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Days Gone
- Drive Club
- Astro Bot
- Blood & Truth
- Detroit
- Horizon
- Until Dawn
- The Last Guardian
- Marvel Spider-Man

Not all of them was hits, But still.

This generation we have....
- Returnal
- Concord
- Destruction AllStars

And everything that was announced before the PS5 release and Remasters of some of those games on PS4.
The only good thing they been doing is 3rd Party exclusives and partnerships.
But when it comes to Sony themselves, the hardware department seems to be more productive.

There's no appetite for risk, because the average gamer doesn't give a shit any more.
I have no faith left in this industry.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

You could make a game in under 2 years. and pay the developers in pizza and red bull. That's why we got so many experimental games in those days.

Give someone 7 years and 200 million dollars and you don't want them to come up with Megalopolis.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

If anyone thinks high budget games have got stale I’d agree with them. Indies have more variety of ideas and the production values are getting much better than ever.

BUT, all those rehashed cods and fifas and 6 years of Fortnite etc…. If that’s what people want than it shows maybe most gamers don’t really care about edgy innovative games.

They just want good games they are familiar with and tweaked over time.

Case in point most Nintendo games are rehashed since the 90s. But incrementally improved, and once they change it up like Zelda, it’ll be the same kind of Zelda or Mario or smash bro for 20 years. These games sell a ton each time.

 

[Moriarty1889]

Sonys last great gen game wise was PS3 imho. PS4 had its moments but nothing like what we got on PS3. We had shooters, racers, platformers, open world adventure and so much more. When I look at the massive library I have for my PS3 consoles and compare it to my PS5 it dwarfs it. And yes I know this gen isn’t over yet but there is no way they could come close to putting out the amount of great games they did on the PS3 gen. Now Sony has dedicated a lot of its resources to GAAS and remasters this gen. Very few original first party games along with sequels to their big IPs as they have played it safe thus far.

 

[Optimus Lime]

I used to love the Playstation. The PSX/PS2 years were amazing, and they were the first consoles I ever bought, since I was PC-only for the 80's and 90's. The depth of the catalog, all of the weird interesting things coming out of Japan, it was just a very exciting time.

The PS4 and now the PS5? They are both wet farts with nothing interesting about them. They are sterile, bland, flavourless systems pushing the same rotation of franchised media over and over and over again. Sony cranks the prices up, yet in return, they offer their bland, overrated first party junk, and 'Pro' (lol) editions of their consoles, which seem designed to little more than Trojan horse a resetting of hardware prices.

It has lost it's edge. I was thinking about the PS5 Pro the other day, and I turned on my PS5 to see how it would benefit me. There's just nothing there. The Last Of Us? Fortnite? God Of Soy? I mean, is that it? If you have a decent PC, the PS5 has so little to offer compared to other generations that it's quite crazy.

'B-B-BUT THIS IS SONY'S GREATEST GEN EVER AND THEY CRUSHED MICROSOFT LOL'. Yeah, I get it. I don't care. All that tells me is that people really love playing the same games ad infinitum, paying for remasters of stuff from the 90's and 2000's, and getting ripped off with ludicrous software and hardware pricing. I want old Sony back - the Sony that gave me Metal Gear Solid and Syphon Filter, but it also gave me Vib Ribbon and Fantavision. If a game has to sell God Of War numbers for it to be considered worth creating, then you'll find me over here with PCSX2, playing games that aren't dog shit.

 

[Hypereides]

There's definitely something to it. The current leadership has no idea what its creatively doing. Old PS used to be "high budget indie games" if that makes sense. Now, they couldn't be further away from that if they tried.

New Sony is all about vacuuming your wallet dry while dangling 'member berries in front of you in an attempt to keep you mesmerized. I feel like this "genius" strategy will eventually bite Hulst, and the folks above him, in the ass if they stay on this path. I really want them to realise that and turn course.

To be fair, all "the big three" have kinda stagnated creatively.

The 'edge' that's missing isn't a Parappa sequel or a re-run of yesteryear's biggest hits. What's been lost is the spirit of innovation - the disruptive devil-may-care energy that backed so many weird and wonderful hits.

The portfolio is all ready-made hits that, even when they're good, do exactly what you're expecting. Helldivers 2 is a rare exception, but there's little to suggest Sony saw this as anything more than a business-level beta program for what it imagined were much more serious live service titles like Concord.

It's become overrun by a painfully polite but aggressively careerist band of metropolitan bean counters who lack imagination or personality and see game creation as a data-driven product-development pipeline intended to print money rather than capture hearts and minds.

Summarises the issue all really.

 

[Three]

All round just a silly take of an article:

"After these ill-fated efforts, Astro Bot seems even better by comparison. A big, colourful splash of silliness at a time when many PlayStation exclusives border on pretentious"

Which recent PlayStation exclusives are "pretentious"?

Astrobot they mention but Helldivers 2 is about stomping bugs and robots, stellar blade is tits and ass, FF7 isn't really pretentious and more a classic remade, Rise of the Ronin is your typical Team Ninja game, GT7 or Horizon?

I'm trying to figure out how "it's at a time many playstation exclusives border on pretentious"

Articles like this are just fan baiting rants mostly.

 

[ProtoByte]

The 'edge' that's missing isn't a Parappa sequel or a re-run of yesteryear's biggest hits. What's been lost is the spirit of innovation - the disruptive devil-may-care energy that backed so many weird and wonderful hits.

It's just not realistic to expect the same degree of "innovation" in it's purest form. PS1 was part of the introduction to 3D games. Can't be understated how unlikely it is for that kind of universal shift in game design principals.

Sony is fine. Playstation is fine. The numbers are better than ever.

This is Xbox talk. Down to the sentence structure that reads like words of self affirmation.

The numbers are not better than ever as it pertains to profit margins. The numbers aren't better when you're talking about the sheer collapse of people on Xbox's side that should have come to PlayStation, but haven't. Nintendo's numbers for the Wii were great before they weren't great for the Wii U. Assassin's Creed numbers were up massively for 3, and then tumbled for most of the decade until they shook up the formula with Origins.

Concord is not a minor hitch, it's a benchmark for where Sony is right now. They've wasted years worth of premier studio time on stupid projects that wound up getting canned. They've wasted hundreds of millions on VR that no one cares about. They're about to distract themselves with handheld BS. They've padded out their release schedule with an unreasonable number of remasters.

None of this is good trajectory.

 

[Moses85]

No shit, they thought this would be an unprecedented success. Fuck Hulst.

 

[kyussman]

They have had some great visionary people in charge over the years,but this current crop are not delivering.....add to that the woke apocalypse and you have a product in the PS5 I have little to no interest in and I've been a big fan over the years.

 

[kaizenkko]

It's just not realistic to expect the same degree of "innovation" in it's purest form. PS1 was part of the introduction to 3D games. Can't be understated how unlikely it is for that kind of universal shift in game design principals.


This is Xbox talk. Down to the sentence structure that reads like words of self affirmation.

The numbers are not better than ever as it pertains to profit margins. The numbers aren't better when you're talking about the sheer collapse of people on Xbox's side that should have come to PlayStation, but haven't. Nintendo's numbers for the Wii were great before they weren't great for the Wii U. Assassin's Creed numbers were up massively for 3, and then tumbled for most of the decade until they shook up the formula with Origins.

Concord is not a minor hitch, it's a benchmark for where Sony is right now. They've wasted years worth of premier studio time on stupid projects that wound up getting canned. They've wasted hundreds of millions on VR that no one cares about. They're about to distract themselves with handheld BS. They've padded out their release schedule with an unreasonable number of remasters.

None of this is good trajectory.

You is just thinking in facts that are good for your argument. They have fail with Concord, but have done a good job with Helldivers 2, Astro Bot, Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin. All these games were funded by Sony, some of them for a long amount of time.

They have made a VR last gen and everybody still thinks that the PS4 is one of their best consoles. They always made remakes/remasters, it's not something new.

I miss the old Sony communication style, I don't like the idea of they making live service games and a lot of other things could be better. But things are not that bad how people here say.

Since the PS5 reveal they have manage to release a good amount of games, some of they really great ones. I really can't think in a single publisher that have done much better.

 

[DenchDeckard]

I think something was lost when House left. Then we lost Boyes. Now Shu has gone.

It's sad because Sony were the ones that pushed the industry into having such extreme motion capture etc due to games like Last Of Us and Uncharted. Games that the industry couldnt afford to make 5 years ago, never mind today. Now we all have this unrealistic expectation what a first party AAA game should look like but the reality is they are completely unsustainable and now we have one game every 5 to 6 years.

I think we need a reset. Go back to cheaper looking games with solid framerates and good content, not hours upon hours of cutscenes. Such as the new Indie game.

 

[Hohenheim]

Lots of what is written in this articel is based on nostalgia. The writer says he remembers the magic of those old child-friendly series, which is great.
I kinda feel the same, lots of fond memories from the ps1 and ps2.

The "problem" is that kids today seldom gets these memories, because they mostly only play 3 games: Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox.
And they seldom play on consoles, compared to what the generation before did/does.

Astrobot would probably have sold a lot more if it released during the ps2 era, and it's not very strange that they don't make many of these games anymore when they won't get the big sales numbers.
Astrobot, while being a cool game, almost didn't do anything compared to the three old games that kids play.

I think the days when the majority if kids got their childhood gaming memories from consoles are over, outside of Nintendo.

 

[MatrixReloaded101]

It's funny how quickly Sony's goodwill among gamers has deteriorated. This kind of criticism used to be limited to forums and shut down immediately by fanboys as concern trolling but now it's effectively hit mainstream. I remember just a few years ago I was being called chicken little for literally pointing out where things were heading.

They are simply out of touch. Out of touch with their audience that they cultivated with IPs they no longer touch. Out of touch with the audience they cultivated by making amazing E3 shows they no longer do. Out of touch with the audience they cultivated making AAA single player games they have set aside in favor of GaaS trash they cant even seem to get out. out of touch with the audience they cultivated by releasing industry leading graphics and then launching the console with 2 years of cross gen games.

They just had a year where they launched Helldivers 2, Astro bot, FF7 Rebirth, Steller Blade, Concord, Rise of Ronin and Silent Hill 2 as exclusives and yet, their fans are still not happy. Clearly, it's not enough. Clearly they are clamoring for more. They want that KZSF style wow moment. They want an Uncharted 2 or Killzone 2 caliber game. They want an E3 like 2015. Not State of Plays.

Sony execs must ask themselves why this year of all years did not click with their fanbase. Why so many games failed to perform. But they will take the wrong lessons and simply make more helldivers 2.

What they should do:

- Restructure all studios and give them a 3 year mandate. Make games in 3 years or fuck off. If it turns out to be a 15 hour game instead of a 50 hour game then fine.
- No more safe/formulaic stuff like Ratchet, Spiderman 2, HFW and Ragnorak. You are first party. Innovate. No more copy pasta games.
- Cancel all remakes. They limit the creativity of your developers by forcing devs to stay true to the original vision and are low effort jobs that a first party should never touch.
- Cancel all GaaS games. Let good developers like ND, GGM, Insomniac make games with MP modes if they want. KZ2, Resistance, TLOU1 and Uncharted had great MP modes. No need for GaaS.

Here is the thing, PlayStation consumers have changed.

All the things you mentioned would work if they were selling to the older audience like most of us on Neogaf but the issue with older gamers is they have major nostalgia glasses and they can’t understand how much gaming has changed which is why Sony changed.

In 2024, the biggest games/IP isn’t God of War, Killzone or Uncharted anymore it’s Fornite and Roblox. Fornite makes more money than all of Sonys top IP combined in a couple months and Sony has realized this which is why they attempted to make a game like Concord because those GaaS generates crazy revenue.

The IPs you mentioned in the end of the post like Killzone and Resistance would get zero traction because the MP market is very competitive and saturated now. Sony is looking at those moves like a waste of money because if they were to put resources into making a new Socom for example the number of players it would get would not even be worth the resources spent on it because in order for a game like that to be successful they would have to peel off call of duty players and players from other MP games which is very hard to do.

I do agree that they do need to take more risk and start pumping out a higher volume of games by scaling back a bit. But I think they have become extremely risk adverse which also prevents them from revising their old IP for fear of it not getting the sales they want but their output is just terrible this gen and they are still making record high profits which isn’t encouraging for the future.

 

[killatopak]

People hate on remakes but keep asking for BB remake.

Make it make sense please.

You know what I missed. Playstation RPGs. Sure they didn't sell as well as the others but some of my fondest memories were their rpgs. Legend of Legaia, Dark Cloud, Wild Arms etc.

 

[veterangamerUK]

Because there's no competition, they just act like the cable company guys in the south park episode with holes cut in their shirts, rubbing their nipples while people complain

 

[neocycle]

I never liked Sony. I bought a PS3 because Nintendo decided to make weak consoles. Up to that point I was exclusively with Nintendo. I have a PS5 now, and it's good, but I'm not looking forward to any Sony games because I don't want Trans propaganda shoved down my throat.

 

[RoboFu]

Damnit hulst!

 

[Vlodril]

Sony outselling the other consoles by twice or thrice the amount. Gamers hate Sony.

Ok..

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

It's funny how quickly Sony's goodwill among gamers has deteriorated. This kind of criticism used to be limited to forums and shut down immediately by fanboys as concern trolling but now it's effectively hit mainstream. I remember just a few years ago I was being called chicken little for literally pointing out where things were heading.

They are simply out of touch. Out of touch with their audience that they cultivated with IPs they no longer touch. Out of touch with the audience they cultivated by making amazing E3 shows they no longer do. Out of touch with the audience they cultivated making AAA single player games they have set aside in favor of GaaS trash they cant even seem to get out. out of touch with the audience they cultivated by releasing industry leading graphics and then launching the console with 2 years of cross gen games.

They just had a year where they launched Helldivers 2, Astro bot, FF7 Rebirth, Steller Blade, Concord, Rise of Ronin and Silent Hill 2 as exclusives and yet, their fans are still not happy. Clearly, it's not enough. Clearly they are clamoring for more. They want that KZSF style wow moment. They want an Uncharted 2 or Killzone 2 caliber game. They want an E3 like 2015. Not State of Plays.

Sony execs must ask themselves why this year of all years did not click with their fanbase. Why so many games failed to perform. But they will take the wrong lessons and simply make more helldivers 2.

What they should do:

- Restructure all studios and give them a 3 year mandate. Make games in 3 years or fuck off. If it turns out to be a 15 hour game instead of a 50 hour game then fine.
- No more safe/formulaic stuff like Ratchet, Spiderman 2, HFW and Ragnorak. You are first party. Innovate. No more copy pasta games.
- Cancel all remakes. They limit the creativity of your developers by forcing devs to stay true to the original vision and are low effort jobs that a first party should never touch.
- Cancel all GaaS games. Let good developers like ND, GGM, Insomniac make games with MP modes if they want. KZ2, Resistance, TLOU1 and Uncharted had great MP modes. No need for GaaS.

This post being written after the month that’s possibly PlayStation 5 peak in terms of sales so far is something.

PS5 had quite a great number of games this year and saying its not enough is an exception to the rule. People aren’t buying PlayStation consoles just for the exclusivity and that was never the case. The exclusives that came out were well received from the public and critics with the exception of Concord, Until Dawn remake (that will peak with the movie releasing next year anyway) and Lego Horizon. Helldivers 2 alone far paid for all of this. They still had Rise of the Ronin. stellar blade had decent sales for a new IP as well. Astrobot, a game made by 60 people sold over 1.5M copies in a month i think. It’s more than paid at this point as well.

I was just reading an interview with shawn layden and this has always been who PlayStation is, even today:

Sony deliberately never had more than maybe 22 percent of [first-party] software share. On the Sega platforms and Nintendo, first-party had 80, 85, 90 percent of the software market. But we always knew PlayStation would only be successful if we made it, quote, 'The People's Platform'. It's for third parties to come make a business. We'll come in and we'll get, you know, 25 percent typically at launch, the share is higher because we put all the bets on the new games. But over time, you know, the real leaders in that marketplace as far as revenue and share goes were the Activisions and the Take-Twos and EA

This is what PlayStation has always been about. The partnerships with 3rd party publishers like SH2 or Rebirth. The hiring of 3rd party studios for games like Bloodborne, Stellar Blade and RofR and then only a few 1st party huge games.

If Sony has lost its edge for doing what they have always done while following the market trends then maybe thats a good thing.

 

[Punished Miku]

They try to make very safe mainstream appeal products now designed to sell tens of millions and be optioned off for movies or TV. In that sense, yes they lost their edge. They don't have that experimental, artistic, AA streak they once had. They don't even manage to have any likeable public facing employees, or real events. It's just as much the fault of the fans and consumers as it is PS themselves. They both seem happy with each other, so it doesn't really matter what edge is lost. Consumers also lost their edge, so it's a perfect fit really. Minds dulled from 10+ years of Marvel and Taylor Swift. Tuning into the Keighley's to find out which actor will present best DLC / remake of the year. It's all just so exciting.

 

[V1LÆM]

This has been the most boring generation of Playstation for me. I only got my PS5 because the Slim model came out and I had money to burn. I need a console for GTA VI so that's why I got it. The only exclusives that I've been interested in are FFVII Part 2, Demons Souls, and Stellar Blade. 2 of them will eventually be on PC and I hated Demons Souls. I could've waited until closer to VI release (so another year probably lol) but I didn't want to wait for VII Part 2 to come to PC.

Once I've played GTA VI then I'll be getting rid of my PS5. Until then it's a YouTube/Netflix machine.

 

[Rudius]

This gen have some real gems like this, i don't know why gamers are complaining

Some heavy hitters right there.

 

[hyperbertha]

The article is so stuck on nostalgia that it hurts my eyes.

Games have evolved. If Sony was doing only games like Astrobot, the brand wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today.

In 2024 alone Playstation had remasters (TLOU2 and Horizon), it had Helldivers 2 that basically became one of the year's biggest selling games, Astrobot (first full game from Astrobot non-VR), it had 3rd party console exclusives like FFVII Rebirth and Silent Hill 2 (the best way to celebrate your history is good remakes from your older games), they released 2 exclusive new IPs they financed from other studios, Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin. Its the only console where you can play Black Myth: Wukong, the biggest surprise of the year. Even the early 2024 viral hit Palmon is already on PS5 as we speak.

Yes they also released Concord, Lego Horizon and an Until Dawn remake no one asked for...but this just shows how they are anything but losing their edge. Making games, financing them and releasing them are still their priority.

And look...i just mentioned one GaaS title on my post.

Discounting the remakes and live service crap, didn't pretty much all of those games review mediocrely except astrobot and wukong? I think you are proving op's point. PlayStation used to be geared towards enthusiast gamers, now it's just for normies who mug up the likes of remakes and helldivers.

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

Discounting the remakes and live service crap, didn't pretty much all of those games review mediocrely except astrobot and wukong? I think you are proving op's point. PlayStation used to be geared towards enthusiast gamers, now it's just for normies who mug up the likes of remakes and helldivers.

No?
Helldivers 2 didn't review in any mediocre way. Rebirth is hardly a remake. It's literally a different game and basically reimagined the original game. Both Rebirth and Astrobot are 2 of the top 3 best rated games of the year in any platform and can only be played on PS5. Stellar Blade also got reviews in its 80's. Silent Hill 2, a game everyone expected to be bad, also reviewed really great.

Yes they released a remaster for TLOU2 and Horizon (in a good way btw) but that doesn't take away everything else.

If 2024 was a bad year for Playstation then poor everyone else, lmao.