MrGawain

If you own a shoe shop and you notice you’re selling far more wellingtons than anything else, you don’t stop selling trainers and sandals because they only sell 20% of what the wellingtons do. You offer as many different designs so you can attract the most customers.

Sony have convinced themselves big open world action games with deep narratives are the only games anyone cares about (like Microsoft thinks about fps), and have forgotten you need a mix to build a customer base. If you can get someone to buy a PS5 to play an obscure JRPG or weird racing game, they may also buy God Of War or Spider-Man to try them out.

Oddly enough both Japanese produced games with some zany stuff in them. And 3rd and 4th most liked Dynasty Warriors and Silent Hill are also Japanese games.

Exactly what the PS5 has been a bit thin on.

Astrobot looks fun if slightly the same as the last game. I can’t tell if Infinite Nikki is an RPG or a dress up Dolly game from what they showed, but I would like another solid JRPG so I’m slightly interested. Everything else was standard fare for people who like that sort of thing, but not for me.

For actual presentation, it really was just a bunch of trailers strung together that didn’t need to be tied together as a presentation.

Maybe there's less games that interest people these days?

As a PS5 owner for almost 2 years now I’m disappointed with my purchase. There are games… just not many I want to play. To me Playstation has gone too heavy for the 18-30 metric with a lot of deep narrative lead games and sandbox games, but they’ve neglected the casual gamer, the family gamer, the party gamer and fans of weird styles of games. I suspect this is the large majority of groups of people who haven’t bought a PS5 yet. This applies to XBox even more, and shows why Nintendo have cornered those markets.

Hopefully they can offer something for those customers with the upcoming State Of Play.

Naughty Dog has been and is making games for the core PlayStation fan- narrative driven 3rd person action games. There is nothing wrong with that or the fans of that.

Unfortunately they’ve already bought a PS5 but Sony needs something to get the people who don’t like those games to buy one, which they won’t get because they’ve shut down all the quirky and weird studios.

Same problem as Microsoft.

Let’s be honest, 99% of us are excited about this because it’s something slightly different with some humour and colour in it.

If they had a couple of big headline games and some smaller 1st party stuff and then some traditional 3rd party PlayStation games then I think they would go head to head with their competition.

But we know they don’t.

Instead I can see them holding back for a random Tuesday sometime later, show the Lego Horizon thing, maybe a new game or a sequel to something smaller and a bunch of standard 3rd party yearly drops like Assassin’s Creed. They will tell people what they’ve got for this year, but won’t set themselves up for hype and then criticism.

What has redefined ‘the mainstreams perception of gaming’?

Pac-Man
Super Mario Bros
Tetris
Street Fighter 2
Pokemon
COD
GTA
Wii Sports
Minecraft

Quite a statement. I doubt a 3rd person perspective narrative game will make the casuals turn their head.

It’s not about ‘The Presentation’ or ‘The Direct’ or ‘The Showcase’, all they are is long form adverts. The reality is you need a good product/products- basically games. And hopefully you can show them no more than 6 months until they are released.

Realistically we know Sony don’t have that much in the bag for the rest of the financial year. I think the apathy for PlayStation will continue as triple A gaming struggles with budgets and coming up with any new ideas.

Hope we get an Astrobot game soon. That had loads of new ideas from 3D Mario games I enjoyed.

I’m guessing pretty much all of the core PlayStation fan base now owns a PS5.

The real sell for Sony now is attracting the casual gamer and families. I still think the PS5 library is very heavy on story based sandbox games and is lacking in party games, platformers, and colourful stuff.

The whole point of a console is plug and play- you can easily experience lots of different games by simply swapping out one disc or cartridge for another, and the box costs you a standalone £300-£500. If you’re only going to play one game as service you might as well bypass the box and get an all in one PC instead. That’s why World Of Warcraft was a big PC game. Without showing the variety of what their console offers Playstation are sort showing it’s a bit pointless.

They’re lucky to get to that seeing how poorly they’ve run the business.

Software sells hardware, not season passes.

Sony has always sat somewhere in between XBox and Nintendo. Mature and Family, Big Budget and Smaller Clever Idea.

Currently it’s pretty obvious the market cares more about the latter than the former, and I think it makes sense for Sony to support the mid tier and indie titles, with a few triple A games scattered between. Not every game has to sell 10m copies for £70. There is a land underneath where games can be turned around quicker and are more fun. This is the market Nintendo has completely, and the Playstation has lost ground on. They also need to stop mentioning the more powerful successor and the PS5 being in the end of its life. All it does is make people uncertain and drive people away.

Click and Paste, bish bash bosh, wait for the money to roll in!

These services are only worthwhile if they have stuff you want to try. If you love indie games then it’s great- but then it’s probably greater if you could play them on the go on Switch or Steam.

Current AAA games have not been up to par recently.

At this moment the PS5 has surpassed the Wii U in pointless gimmicks.

The numbers for PS4 3rd party exclusives is about the same as the PS4, but not the 1st party numbers.

And I get there isn’t a parity in graphics, but the Switch has had at least twice as many exclusives in all flavours per year as XBox and Playstation COMBINED.

Remake released on a console with 100m+ user base.

Rebirth did not.

The biggest issue with sales for PS5 games is Sony has just assumed people would buy a console and wait patiently for games to release on it. In reality it’s becoming a Wii U situation where it doesn’t matter if a few good games are appearing on the system because all the general consumer sees is the droughts in between. Plus I bet £70 puts a lot of people off of the game.

It's great to see his legacy will keep going and we'll get more games like Suikoden with Eiyuden.

Although as a fan of Suikoden I wonder if some of those unanswered questions about certain Suikoden characters (Viki, Jeanne, Clive, and Yuber and Pesmerga to name a few) will remain unanswered with his passing. It's these story threads that has kept the Suikoden fandom going.

I got the game and played it over Christmas. It was fun at the beginning but it really became copy/paste/repeat after a while.

The idea of more of the same really turns my guts like the 8th helping of treacle tart.

I loved the 2018 one, but I felt the sequel was just larger and wordier. Such a big world to traverse but I felt there wasn’t really a choice but to go down the path set out for me so I could listen to all that waffle dialogue.

I’m very critical of what they’ve delivered on the PS5 so far, but if they can bring some fun games like Astrobot I’ll be happy.

If Nintendo isn't willing to make a Mario Galaxy 3, then Sony might as well do it.

Sony didn’t help themselves by announcing they wouldn’t have any big games for the financial year people would actually be excited about.

Even if there is fun stuff to announce, they’ve already poured cold water on it themselves.

Isn’t the PS6 coming in 2026? That takes away the only argument Sony has to get anyone to buy a PS5.5.

Should have marketed it as a sleeping mask.

Somehow I get the feeling this will be about as beneficial to the PS5’s library as a New 3DS was to 3DS gaming.

Let’s be honest, Sony hasn’t made an effort to cater for the Japanese market, and they’re not going to catch up with Nintendo. But 2 weeks after release about 5% of Japanese PS5 owners own physical copies of FF7Rb. That isn’t that bad.

I find it ironic this is the PS5 game I’ve been most excited about.

The fact Sony are releasing performance specs shows they’re still sailing on the Quadruple A business model to impress their customers. How they’ll continue to do so with their budget cuts remains a bit of a mystery.

The games industry has overestimated how many ‘core’ gamers there are. Sony and MS have spent too much chasing the Mountain Dew/Doritos eating fans with big budget action games, and have ignored the casual and family gamers who were scared off by a £450 console that was almost impossible to get for 2 years and then had a drip feed of either FPS on Xbox or open world glorified films on Playstation.

Meanwhile Nintendo catered to this market whilst not busting the bank, sold 140 million units and made a fortune by selling indie and 3rd party games as well as their big tentpole titles.

If the customer doesn’t buy your console, they can’t spend any money on your games.

This wheel was set in motion a long time ago, and there’s not much Sony can do to solve it immediately. Yes we get wages and manufacturing costs have gone up, and disposable incomes have gone down. But PlayStation has made a rod for their own back by streamlining and not diversifying. They don’t care about the casual gaming market. They don’t care about the handheld market. They don’t really care about Japanese and Asian markets. They’ve just assumed everybody is a core gamer that has five hundred quid to buy a box to plug into their thousand pound 4K Sony TV and play the same sort of bloated western open world games that cost £70 a pop. They’ve limited their audience to ‘the core gamer’ because they think they’ll blindly buy whatever they put out and allow this $300m a game cycle to continue for their ego. In reality a lot of these ‘core gamers’ also have families now and can’t justify this hobby day one. And the ones that can have bought PCs instead. The new generation of gamers and family gamers are playing on phones or happy with their Switches, or have just kept their PS4s.

But as I said, this was set in motion a long time ago, a Sony can’t fix this overnight. But they can plan for a future where everything has to be so flashy and so expensive- because it’s bound by the law of diminishing returns.

I played Brothers on the PS4 and it’s a truly unique experience, both gameplay and story. Admittedly it was just as short and buggy then.

I question how improving the graphics make it any better than it was, because that really isn’t what the game was about.

The business model is unsustainable. They don't have enough games, they take too long to make, there isn't enough of a userbase, the games are too expensive for a lot of people, and yet all we hear about is more powerful consoles for more detailed games, that they can't make because they've thinned their workforce.

That's just insane.

@Herculean

Well, no. I mean the game ended with a definite story finality, and then they are going to change that ending with an update. Imagine If Charles Dickens had released a revised version of a Christmas Carol where Scrooge really killed all the Christmas Ghosts and then evicted the entire population of London. This isn’t a continuation, it’s an alteration. Being able to change a story after they’ve released it to the world cheapens the original story.

Imagine watching a tv series for a season where there the end episode resolves all the characters stories, only for a year later another episode comes out and says ‘actually all that happened in the last episode was a dream, and this is what really happened’.

And you had to pay more for it.

Well they’ve spent more money, but I don’t get how doing this sell any more copies of this game than an ordinary billboard would do?

How commerce works: consumer wants product, manufacturer makes product, consumer buys product if it is quality and priced to what they are willing to pay.

It doesn’t work by a company making a half finished product that no one asked for and expecting people to buy it and then be charged again for missing parts of the product that may or may not be delivered.

Business is simple when you listen to your customers.

“If we continue to entertain, delight, and surprise our community of gamers, I think Totoki-san and whoever follows him will be just fine.”

Unfortunately the PS5 has been focusing on remakes and very samey sequels. The developers in Japan that were trying weird and surprising stuff got canned 5 years ago.

To me Hi-Fi Rush looks like the sort of game that Playstation has been sorely missing for a while- a mix of Parappa, DMC, and No More Heroes. And it has a variety of colours in it!

Think how many times Mario died in video games- falling down pits, getting burned by spinning flame thingys, and walking into mushrooms and the NYT has NEVER covered any of those.

Think of all the hypothetical games you could play with EVEN MORE power!

Eventually, that is.

Not this year, obviously.

I wonder if the news Sony hasn’t got a big exclusive for the next year changed the announcement?

Why give Playstation the big titles when you now have the upper hand?

@Grumblevolcano

I guess the current argument is the next generation are playing on phones and tablets, and the games they play like fortnite aren't graphically intensive.

I wonder if the play for Sony is to go Switch style portable console? Because there is no reason to release another console at a loss if Sony can't make a profit on games.

Seeing they’re worried about budgets and development time for their games, I’m not entirely sure how replacing the PS5 for something more powerful in 3-4 years will solve the problem?

Quick, the horse has left the barn! Close the door!

I can’t believe three years in they’ve only just noticed they don’t have enough games and have spent too much cash.

@themightyant

But TOTK is maybe one of 2 or 3 first part big budget games on the Switch. Everything else is comparably much cheaper. Even by your own example, TOTK is around 60m cheaper than TLOU2, which I bet could be 2 more budgets for some of Nintendo’s less costly games. Plus a Zelda or Mario game is pretty much guaranteed to succeed. There are lots of big budget AAA games that get released that are still broken, or dull, or cynically propped up with extra charges. Nintendo tend to avoid those issues.

@get2sammyb

I get the metrics of it, I just think the business plan is deeply flawed. Especially when you consider Sony’s biggest games on the PS5 are never going to sell as well as Animal Crossing or Mario Kart 8 that have a fraction of the budgets. Having bigger, prettier games hasn’t gained more players for those games, it’s just caused Sony to give up on smaller games that could have been a bit more creative.

I feel very foolish buying a PS5 assuming there would be a steady flow of fun experiences to play.

I thought we had been going through the drought, and now the drought is the next year?

This console generation has been absolutely pathetic.

The Xbox has barely any compelling exclusives. And the PS5 is beating it on compelling exclusives 2 to 1.

Still not great, is it?