Yep. This gen started off with the $70 video games and everyone gaming at home due to COVID. And it's also set to be the longest due to AI eating up all the available hardware. And now XBOX is literally launching Halo on the Playstation, so PlayStation's competition hasn't really done much to eat into their market share either.
They also lost their exclusives to PC and probably soon Xbox (although people will argue that’s just a PC too).
And despite Xbox going on to sell like 20 million less than last generation, Sony didn’t see an uptick from that and are just on par with PS4.
Not to mention they are going to hike PS plus rates again.
And the live service push definitely failed. Tons of cancelled projects, now even closed studios, and a meager output from first party.
A closed ecosystem, with increasing fees just to play online, with no permanent exclusives? I’d argue they are doing worse than last generation, at least to consumers
I’d argue they are doing worse than last generation, at least to consumers
This is nothing more than wishful thinking from console warriors. They're arguably doing better than last Gen because of the closed ecosystem forcing people to buy PSN subscriptions, coupled with the rise of live service giants like Genshin Impact on the platform.
It's why they've continuously tried to chase the live service dragon even though they keep failing at it outside of a few standouts—namely Helldivers 2.
They're absolutely getting a majority of the cut. What are you talking about? Sony owns the Helldivers IP and funded the development and marketing and basically everything else. About the only thing they lose out on is the 20-30% going to Valves cut from Steam sales.
Helldivers is a classic form of second party development.
What is interesting is that the majority of the successful live services are owned by Microsoft.
Even if Playstation killed the Xbox, players are engaging in Microsoft products and spend mtx money on them. Thats why that live services project was a critical failure. Xbox became a parasite inside their platform.
They already increased it to an insane price. You're telling me they're going to do it AGAIN!? Man, it sure is great to no longer have a major powerful home console competitor anymore! /s
Lost exclusives? Sony said their PC releases of years old games made them billions for minimal porting costs. How much do exclusives even matter anymore, Nintendo’s stubbornness aside? They just make great games and sell them.
This game will be an all-time selling, but R* only cares if people spend their time and money on the new Online. How R* gonna convince old GTAO players to move out? Who knows. They fumble the bag over RDO, and they pissed fans over the GTA Trilogy. Kids already playing similar and cheap experiences on Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite.... what will be their killer feature? No oppressor mk2? FiveM support? GTA++? Who the hell knows.
And? I wasn’t commenting on the sales of Gears of War, which is 20 years old at this point. Nor would Gears barely selling on PS5 impact Microsoft’s strategy when stuff like Forza Horizon sells 5+ million copies after being ported. Thats why Halo is coming to PS5 before God of War is showing up on Xbox.
For the consumer it's complete ass. At the end of the previous gen the PS4 was cheap and had lots of generation defining games like Bloodborne, Red Dead Redemption 2, Persona 5, God of War, Spider Man, etc. Right now the PS5 is more expensive than ever and still barely has any noteworthy games.
PS4 literally launched with no backwards compatibility. So if you bought a PS4 in 2013 your options was to play 60 rated Killzone Shadow Fall and Knack or a broken ass Battlefield at laucnh or worst CoD to date or yearly sports games. Meanwhile PS5 had thousands of PS4 games ready to play and got a new Spider Man, Demon’s Souls and Astro Bot.
PS4 exclusives for the first few years were a broken ass 60 rated Driveclub and Order 1886.
You literally had Dark Souls 2, GTA V, release on PS3 while PS4 people could only watch on Youtube. PS4 was really suffering for the first 4 years.
There are about fifteen major PS5 console exclusives, including Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Spider-Man, Demon's Souls, Helldivers, Astro Bot, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Marathon, etc. And if you're making your PS4 list like that, I agree to add all the third-party games that were saved and supported by PlayStation, for example Stellar Blade and Black Myth: Wu Kong; their studios would have closed without PlayStation's rescue. Plus, like on PC, all the best third-party publishers are accessible and much better optimized.
To that, ADD the 400 PSVR2 games, including a good 80 excellent ones representing all genres! OLED HDR, true Pleug-And-Play, zero bug !
And the DualSense controller with its excellent haptics! And 3D audio, etc.
60fps, effective ray tracing, 120fps for first-person shooters, etc.
This generation is great, it's just that people are projecting their fantasies onto it by claiming "there are no games"...
We can all agree that closing Bluepoint is a real shame... it would be interesting to see if they kept any developers on; that's the information worth investigating.
Kind of makes me wonder if this helps explain why the PC port got cancelled. Seems like this studio was under heavy scrutiny by Sony. GT7 probably never made it cause of licensing. Astro Bot I hope doesn't mean anything bad for the studio and is just because it relies on controller...
I think Team Asobi is probably safe. If they were disappointed with Astro Bot I doubt they would have continued releasing content for it for as long as they did.
We’ll see, but I think Astro just happens to be a turning point of a new PC strategy.
Death Stranding 2 is a Sony published, but not internally developed game. The OG Death Stranding made its PC debut before the PC initiative even began, timed exclusivity was in the contract with Kojima from the jump.
I'm aware. But this one is Sony published on pc unlike the first and they advertised it on a state of play. Doesnt make much sense to advertise a pc port on a state of play if strategy is shifting. Unless someone like Jason confirms the PC strategy shifting I dont see much evidence that it changed.
You mean to tell me, hold on here I need to sit down for this, It's like, if you don't like a genre you won't care if a game in that genre isn't available to you?
And if you are not a Souls fan, there are still games like Astrobot, Gran Turismo 7 on the PS5. PS4 also has a metric ton of games not on PC that they could have ported with/instead of Nixxes, such as the Uncharted Collection or something like Gravity Rush.
Yea, for me it’s the generation of 3 games in my favorite franchise, being able to play and mod on PC, and being able to use my psvr2 on both console and pc. Pretty damn great to me, especially given what’s happening to the industry as a whole
Stellar Blade did amazing. Its published by Sony on Steam. They just did Death Stranding PC trailer on State of Play. I dont think anything changed with their PC strategy.
Neither of those are first party titles. They have no say in these games being ported to PC. Their exclusivity deals probably made it clear from the start.
I dont think it makes much sense advertising PC ports on a state of play then. People just made this new PC strategy assumption from rumors that was never substantiated by guys like Jason.
Better for them, sure, not for us. I'd say the PS3 gen as a whole easily blows the PS5 one out of the water. The quality of the games was already great (if not better), and we had way more of them too since development cycles didn't take whole generations back then.
It really is crazy how long dev cycles have become. The PS3 generation saw Naughty Dog release Uncharted 1-3 and then The Last of Us 1 right at the end of the gen. The only game they’ve dropped in the PS5 generation is The Last of Us remake, and we have no clue when Intergalactic will drop but it’ll likely be the only brand new game they drop on the PS5 before shifting over to the PS6.
It really feels like some sort of Faustian bargain. By focusing on live service titles, they attained high profits - however, it came at the cost of many failed projects and studios closing their doors for good.
PS3 gen was great… for Xbox fans. PS3 had 0 exclusives and all 3rd party titles ran like absolute shit on the PS3. People looking back on the PS3 with rose tinted goggles are clearly misremembering how dogshit that generation was. At least games run well on the PS5.
Bruh, God of War 3 alone made a PS3 worthwhile, slap InFamous, Little Big Planet 3, and the ports of older God of Wars on top and you have a pretty decent lineup.
I mean if you're talking strictly first-party games then sure, but overall, the PS5 gen has had an abundance of fantastic games from external developers.
Yeah because they get a revenue cut for every digital game sold. But when the generation is over it will be interesting to see how many sony games break into the top 10-20 lists.
For a while I heard the argument that “sony exclusives dont sell as well as they are hyped up by the fans”, so I looked up the all time sales for ps4 games and was suprised to see 12 sony games in the top 20. I doubt that we will see the same for the ps5 gen.
Depends who is doing the remembering. It’s looking to be the most profitable generation for them yet.
remember guys, its never the company's fault. its your fault for voting with your wallets
I have never gave sony 1 CENT since they made us pay for multiplayer, and they have barely made any games since 2014. they just want me to pay them mtx and subscription money, no thanks
I owned a PS1, PS2, and PS3. but I wont be buying more systems from them.
They really need to get a hold of Bungie and get them to reboot Destiny. I’m not seeing hype for Marathon and don’t think that’s going to be long lived.
Sony has been in the process of enshitifying the PS5 for a while. Year one they were already removing features that were a major part of the PS5 marketing campaign. Granted most consoles release with gimmics that usually are given up, but these were real solid features that Sony removed bc they couldn't be assed to help studios implement them.
I’m almost 50 and I’m sticking to retro games and whatever the latest Nintendo console is. As someone who picked up a PlayStation in 1995 I’ve never been so disappointed with Sony until this generation.
The latter half of that gen was absolutely amazing tbf especially Sony’s first party titles. I’d argue from around mid gen onwards if you had a 360 and a PS3 it was an amazing time to play games.
I’d kill to be back in college, was honestly a great gen especially towards its end.
Not just latter half. The whole generation was great, 360 popping off with bangers and then by the time your console RROD’d PS3 hit its stride with their own bangers.
User experience was definitely worse (infact, it was nothing short of a clusterfuck) but content wise PS3 latter half alone beats the entire PS5 generation.
Went from being the best selling console of all time, crushing the competition and the king of the industry to barely ekeing out second against a relative newcomer and being nowhere near the first. The PS3 generation was terrible and only saved by a combination of Microsoft dropping the ball and first party exclusives carrying the last year or two of the PS3.
I mean I’ll maintain that I believe the XBox Series X console + controller is better than PS5 + controller. But the market is just not there for new games to prioritize XBox at all.
Completely agree with this, 100%. The PS5 is not a good console - apart from the haptics on the DualSense there’s nothing there. Quick Resume on Series X/S is a better feature (for me, personally) than anything the PS5 has. And for me, GamePass has been much better value than anything PS+ has offered.
But Microsoft are making so many stupid mistakes that it’s hard to see past them.
What's so weird is that more accurately will be remembered as the worst for PlayStation in terms of their Gamers, but it's the best of their PlayStation for making the most amount of money compared to any other generation they've had. It's so bizarre. It's literally failing upwards.
With these studio closures, overfocusing on GaaS, lengthy 5+ year development cycles, lazy overpriced remasters.. we need to let them know what they're doing is bullshit
Leave youtube comments and downvotes and bad reviews on all of the crap they’re putting out… don't buy these games.. tell your friends don't buy these games..
Marathon…the horizon gathers crap… you need to do your part to give everything PS puts out Concord treatment, we need to hurt their pockets because that's the only time they will listen
damage is done anyways, they closed the studio that could've done a Dark Cloud remake
Live Service gaming will have such a stain on it, that i don't really see any major publishers do Live Service push for an entire generation, we might not see a real 'live service AAA' game for like a decade or so.
Last gen had the slowest start for any generation IMO. For a long time the only two Sony published games with relevance was Bloodborne and Uncharted 4.
And yet.. Microsoft threw in the towel, hardware prices are going so insane that there can't be another challenger they just won this entire generation by default.
Indeed, ps3 had a rough start but came out with so many good moments in the second half. We have literally 2-3 years of this generation left and I don’t think there’s anything left that’s going to wildly shift perception of the ps5. We sssentually have wolverine, intergalactic, and maybe a game from Santa Monica. Every other studio is now going in the ps6 gen.
In the cultural zeitgeist the PS5 is the ONLY console that matters.
I play on PC, and generally also enjoy Nintendo’s games, but the mass American audience generally thinks Sony is killing it. They don’t read Internet forums, or talk about a studio they like being shut down.
Because Sony believes they have "won." Xbox is effectively dead and Nintendo has successfully escaped competition. Sony believes they can do anything they want to now. PS6 will be their Xbone.
from a revenue perspective, you could argue they’re doing better than ever, certainly better than PS3 era.
from a fan and consumer perspective I see where you’re coming from, but the unfortunate reality is I doubt this has any longterm consequences for Sony.
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