PlayStation’s Showcase is getting mixed responses, and that alone is unheard of for a company so used to taking the world by storm and blowing its competition out of the water. As ever, your mileage may vary. Dragon’s Dogma 2, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and Metal Gear Solid Delta/Triangle/Whatever were all warmly received, and we also saw a lot of Spider-Man 2. There was a decent amount of gameplay footage, but that meant little when we had a lack of games to begin with. PlayStation, what gives?
There’s often a bit of confusion around the Showcase and State of Play, but Showcases are the big ones. The fact that needs clarifying after we just had one is already a worrying sign. The Showcase is PlayStation’s new version of an E3 press conference, and, well. It didn’t exactly seem like the sort of thing that would blow the roof off E3, did it?
While there were some big games present, it was light on surprises. We knew Spider-Man 2 would be there, and Metal Gear Solid had long been rumored. Mostly there were some interesting looking smaller titles or teasers for fairly generic live-service titles. Bungie reviving Marathon was the biggest of the bunch, but Bungie reviving Marathon (especially as a PvP extraction shooter) is not the stuff E3 dreams are made of.
Sony has a deep bench with Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica, Team Asobi, Sucker Punch, Guerrilla, Bluepoint, Bend, Housemarque, and Media Molecule, to name but a few. Where were they? Guerrilla just shipped Forbidden West’s DLC, but the rest of them were no shows. You might point to Santa Monica having recently shipped God of War Ragnarok, but Cory Barlog was presumably off doing something else while that happened.
We know several of these studios have games in the pipeline. The Last of Us Factions 2, Astro Bot, Ghost of Tsushima 2, Uncharted remakes, and An Open World Game That Isn’t Days Gone are all either confirmed or rumoured to be in development, and that’s before you get to the projects we know nothing about like Barlog’s game, Housemarque’s game, and whatever Media Molecule is doing. None of these games appeared at the Showcase. The way things are going, it could be that Insomniac has four games (Ratchet, Miles, Spidey, and Wolverine) out on PS5 before some studios even have one.
‘They’re working on those games’, ‘they just aren’t ready to show them yet’, ‘better to hold off than start the hype cycle too early’. I agree with all of that. My criticism is not that in this specific Showcase, PlayStation did not show me all the games I wanted. It’s that the nature of the industry these days has created an environment where games cost too much and take too long. This Showcase, from the previously invincible Sony, is the clearest evidence of that.
I’m sure some will be quick to slice me open with insults I will never recover from, like ‘Xbot’ or, erm, whatever the Nintendo one is. Not true. Xbox has been lagging behind for years and beyond Starfield has little but vague promises to sell us. Nintendo, meanwhile, has Pikmin 4 and then nothing else. A new Super Mario and/or Donkey Kong could take the Christmas spot, but mostly it seems like those two are running dry too.
Of course there are reasons for it. PlayStation and Xbox have transitioned to a new generation, while there’s a lot of smoke around the Switch 2, suggesting a fire burning somewhere. There’s also the pandemic, which meant adjusting to remote working (and in some cases, then adjusting back). I hear you. But mostly, games cost too much and they take too long. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it many times again. The way we make games just isn’t sustainable.
Growing up, the biggest games came out year on year. Now there’s a four year wait at the extreme minimum. Saying PlayStation has no games is not intended as a volley of cannon fire in the console war, nor as an insult to some of the smaller games we saw - out of everything I was most interested in Neva. Saying PlayStation has no games is factual. The console’s identity is built on being the home for exclusives, and the unsustainable way games are made threatens that.
Either we brace for more Showcases like this, across the board, and get used to fewer and fewer major games launching each year, or studios rebalance by turning away from the space race dick measuring contest we’ve found ourselves in and go back to making video games like our mommas made, with reasonable release cycles, lower budgets, and more stable working environments. To say PlayStation has no games is not a potshot, but a warning. There just aren’t enough games in a market like this.