PlayStation has had its worst week ever and it deserves it – Reader’s Feature

A reader has no sympathy for Sony’s terrible week and blames them for the problems with Hideo Kojima and the poorly received Marvel’s Wolverine game.

I would hate to be any kind of exec at Sony PlayStation this week, considering everything that’s happened. When Xbox, who have been having their business meetings wearing clown shoes since at least the Xbox One era, are running rings round you, then you know things have got bad.

Sony has been off the boil ever since the PlayStation 5 came out, or at least after the first year or so when they suddenly stopped making games and stopped doing interviews or having execs appear in State of Plays. This is all about the time they started going all in on live service games, promising 12 by 2026, or whatever it was.

They were apparently so confident that would work out they stopped making single-player games and put all their award-winning studios to work on live service games and well… we all we know what a disaster that was. To the point where just finding out that Fairgames hasn’t been cancelled is enough to count as bad news for most people.

What people think about Fairgames was the least of Sony’s troubles this week, though, after it was announced that they were going to cancel Hideo Kojima’s Physint game and cut all ties with him. Now, you might say that probably they realised that they weren’t going to make much money from the game and that it was going to overrun and Kojima would be a pain to deal with.

That’s very probably true but how did they not know that before they signed the deal? Especially as they handled both Death Stranding games for him. Nothing has changed about Kojima, but a whole lot has changed about Sony.

Now Kojima has signed up with Xbox, so they get to be the heroes who support creative developers and Sony looks like the villain. Which is quite an achievement given how many of thousands of people Microsoft has laid off this year.

As far as I can see it’s Kojima that announced the Physint news, so I think he knew the embargo for Wolverine reviews was going to be on Thursday. I also think he knew the reviews weren’t going to be great. But then anyone could’ve told that from just reading the previews, which made the news for how bad they were. But apparently all the fanboys forgot that, possibly just so they could pretend to act shocked when they weren’t very good.

So on the same day, Sony ended up cancelling one of gaming’s most famous developers (and giving a free boost to Xbox), finding out their only Christmas game is a dud, and getting news of their live service game leaked. What an amazing day at the office that must’ve been.

At this point I have absolutely no sympathy for them. They’ve brought it all on themselves and all these problems have been bubbling under for at least five years now. They know everything they’re doing is the opposite of what fans want but they’re carrying on anyway because they also know they’re the only game in town, in terms of a high-end consoles, and that they’re making tons of money right now, so why change?

You can tell by how little effort they make in communicating with fans that they just don’t care what we think. Has anyone ever appeared anywhere to explain the digital-only, no disc decision? No, not once. We got one blog post (or was it just a tweet?) and that’s it, they’re clearly never going to mention it again. No exec has appeared at Gamescom or in a State of Play to try and make it seem like an unavoidable decision, they just don’t care: this is what they’re doing it and we can like it or lump it.

Every time they do something terrible they seem to handle it in the worst way possible. Like that time they removed all those movies just as they announced they were going all-digital. Or when they sent round the updated T&As, reminding people they don’t own anything digital, just as the PlayStation 5 boycott started. And now Wolverine and Fairgames right on top of Kojimagate.

Either Sony are unlucky, stupid, or they just don’t care. Personally, I think it’s the last option and if they don’t care then I don’t either. So forget you Sony. I’m getting a Switch 2 for Christmas. After all it’s not like I’ll be missing out on any amazing new games.

By reader Cranston

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