PS5 and Sony is now unstoppable and that’s bad for everyone – Reader’s Feature

Does Sony deserve its success? (Sony Interactive Entertainment) A reader and lifelong PlayStation fan is upset to hear that Sony has had such a successful financial year, despite releasing so few games. I’ve been a PlayStation fan ever since there was such a thing. I’ve owned a few different Nintendo machines, as my secondary consoles, but I’ve always been PlayStation #1 in my thinking and Xbox has given me very little reason to regret that. Maybe I felt I was missing out a bit in the Xbox 360 era, but I was younger then and console warrior antics kept me on PlayStation 3 anyway. Nowadays, I like to think I’m less zealous in my opinions and would happily get an Xbox if there was sufficient reason to do so, but I don’t think I’m being too partisan when I say there is not. What would have tempted me to pay hundreds for an Xbox One? Sunset Overdrive and Gears 5? Or is it surprising I wasn’t opening my wallet for an Xbox Series X and the chance to play Halo Infinite and Starfield? These might be good games, but they are absolutely not system sellers. So, despite all Microsoft’s talk of losing the wrong generation and people being stuck in the PlayStation ecosystem the ultimate problem is, and always has been, that the Xbox does not have enough good exclusives. That problem is irrelevant now though. Xbox has gone third party and soon or later there will be no exclusives, because there’ll all be on PlayStation 5 as well. But as a PlayStation fan I’m not going to gloat about that. (Apart from anything I still don’t really care, because there still aren’t any Xbox published games I want, but that is also irrelevant to the point I’m making.) I’m not going to gloat about it because I believe that Microsoft’s fall is the explanation for why Sony has been acting so lazy the last two years. Despite a perfectly normal start to the generation (which was impressive in itself, given the pandemic) they suddenly put the brakes on and stopped announcing games and started going on about live service titles instead… which they also didn’t release in the numbers they said. We all know how the whole live service thing has worked out but so far that failure doesn’t seem to have changed anything at Sony. They had a State of Play on Wednesday that lasted 50 minutes and there was only one new first party game in it. Which won’t be out till 2026. Although that wasn’t great news what bothered me most this week was that PlayStation 5 sales were up over Christmas, despite the fact that Sony didn’t have any big exclusives and had basically done nothing to deserve it. There was no clever marketing, no new features… it wasn’t even a busy time for third party releases, in fact it was one of the worst that I can remember in a long time. So really, Sony did nothing to deserve that success. They made no effort and they released no games and yet they were more successful than the previous year when they had done more. So, what lesson do we think they’re going to learn from that? It’s obvious to me why they did so well. If Xbox console sales are down, and the format is in trouble, then it seems obvious that a lot of people would be jumping ship to Sony. Especially as this is about the time in a generation when fans think about switching formats, to try out the exclusives, or getting a second console. Everything worked in Sony’s favour and yet they really had nothing to do with their own success. The situation now is that they are really the only choice of console. Nobody’s buying an Xbox Series X/S anymore and no matter how big the Nintendo Switch 2 is it’ll never be able to run enough third party games to be a primary console for most people. Sony isn’t doing well because it’s innovating or putting out great games, or even just great marketing, it’s winning because it’s basically the only choice. And that is not good for anyone (including them, I’d argue, not that they’ll care at the moment). The market leader is now unstoppable and it got that way by doing as little as possible and just letting others make mistakes. Not exactly inspiring stuff, is it? Maybe they’ll mess up with the PlayStation 6, or the Switch 2 will be bigger than I expect, but at the moment we’ve never been closer to a one format future and, as a PlayStation fan, I’m not happy about it at all. By reader Trancer The only game in town? (Sony) The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro. You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at [email protected] or use our Submit Stuff page and you won’t need to send an email. ArrowMORE: AI is the future of video games whether we want it or not – Reader’s Feature ArrowMORE: Elden Ring