Is it Time to Boycott PlayStation?
I think it’s fair to say that for the past three to four years, Sony has garnered much criticism from millions of fans across the internet. While the launch of the PS5 seemed to have some remaining energy from the dominant PS4 lifespan; games like Demon’s Souls, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart kept fans hopeful about Sony’s trajectory.
But starting in 2022, they began making decisions that frustrated many a gamer. Sony acquired Bungie in January 2022. Almost immediately after, controversy after controversy began to follow the studio. God of War Ragnarok and Horizon: Forbidden West were cross-generation titles, meaning that PS5 gamers were getting compromised games because Sony wanted to also sell them on a then nine-year old console, the PS4. Instead of fully utilizing the technology of the two-year old (at the time) PS5, these two games were held back.
And of course, it only gets worse in 2023 with the announcement of Concord. Make no mistake- Concord is one of the biggest catastrophic failures in entertainment history. It also serves as the symbol of PlayStations biggest issue in the 2020’s: the fetishization of live-service games.
It makes sense why Sony would want a Fortnite-like success all to themselves. Games like Fortnite and Roblox make a disgusting amount of the money. The type of money that would make profit from titles such as Ghost of Yotei seem like a joke. But there’s one little problem with that plan:
Sony didn’t have any teams built to make such a game.
The latter half of the PS3 and entirety of the PS4 lifecycles were dominated by single-player bangers such as the Uncharted trilogy, Ghost of Tsushima, and The Last of Us. None of their first party studios were knowledgable enough to make a huge multiplayer game. So Sony has been trying to brute force their way into this space by acquiring outside studios such as Firewalk and Haven. They even tried forcing a remake studio, Bluepoint, into making a live-service game in the God of War universe.
Sony has been trying to force a round peg into a square hole. Guess what?
You can’t.
This has all culminated in Sony closing down Bluepoint Games yesterday. A studio simply did what was asked of them and got shut down for it.
Now I’m not trying to say that Sony can’t or shouldn’t try to make one of these Fortnite-esque titles. But when it comes at the sacrifice of your core audience and your employees? It’s not right.
PlayStation has been headed in a direction I’ve hated for the past few years. I’ve got to ask myself at this point if it’s even worth supporting them anymore. I was considering buying Marathon because I thought it looked interesting, but I won’t be doing that anymore. The only way we can speak as gamers is to vote with our wallets. And I shall.
