8mo ago

Is Sony beginning to coast? With PS5 sales up and first-party releases down, gaming's eerie new normal takes shape

www.eurogamer.net

11 comments

This feels like a problem that primarily (exclusively?) affects gaming journalists. Gamers are happy with the console and the available games. The new games that have been teased are under development. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm happy to wait for new games to be fully baked rather than rush them to market to meet some arbitrary deadline. Does anyone not have a backlog to keep them entertained a while?
- The longer development cycle of AAA games does mean we're getting fewer of them than we used to, so the author is right that that is different this time around.
  
  I don't doubt it, I just don't think it's a bad thing.
- As an owner of every PlayStation console since the PS1, I am unhappy with the selection of PS5 games this late in the lifespan of the console. So unhappy that for the first time ever, I consider it unlikely that I will want to buy the next generation console. I’ve played more new releases on my Steam Deck since its release than I have on the PS5 since its release. And that’s coming from someone with a full-time job and a family. I count myself lucky if I can play an hour a day, and the PS5’s game release schedule was too sparse for me.
Eurogamer keeps getting worse and worse... The IGN acquisition of Eurogamer is showing and not in a good way.
Monthly active users - the amount of people playing games on the console - are up considerably, 129m to 90m, on the equivalent period of the previous console.
I'm not convinced that number is the number of people playing games on the consoles but rather the number of people signed into PSN. I haven't played a game on PS4 in 5 years (and we don't have a PS5), but we use it daily to stream video services.
Almost as if the platform you chose dictates the platform’s features not the type of games you have access to.
Although I was a big fan of ps2 exclusives, they are anti consumer at their core.
They coasted in the PS3 era after the absolute success of PS2. So they're set up pretty well to make similar mistakes right now
I feel like Sony isn't exactly coasting but kind of stuck right now instead. They have gained a reputation of fantastic story games that often set the standard for what games should look like visually. This results in longer development times and fewer games being released.
Combine that with the multiple live service game cancellations (Last of Us online, Concord, other reported games never announced), their release schedule looks very slow and right now Xbox studios looks like they'll release more titles this year than Sony's internal studios. Nintendo probably will too despite few announcements for this year as we'll likely get a flood of them after the full unveiling of Switch 2 in April.

11 comments