Games Inbox: Was the PS5’s State of Play a Disaster for PlayStation?

Getting worse
So the state of affairs was exactly what was expected: a nothingburger with the only bright spot being Astro Bot. The only surprise for me was that Astro Bot looked even better than expected and Concord even worse. Concord was so bland and generic that it almost could have been a parody trailer. I barely made it to the end.

I’m sure Sony won’t listen to reasons not to go overboard with live service games until they have several flops in a row, but if Concord is anywhere near as big as Helldivers 2, I’ll be shocked.

Where I do agree with Sony is that Astro Bot is not a ‘big’ franchise and it probably won’t sell very well. I hate to break it to them, but it’s no different for Silent Hill 2, which wasn’t even that big the first time around.

In terms of having major sales exclusives, the State of Play had nothing. It felt more like a small spring event than Sony’s biggest reveal event of the year. They always have that when they announce the PS5 Pro later this year, but I think it’s very clear that there will never be a big event where they announce multiple exclusive first party games.

It might not seem like a big deal right now since we’re so used to these being non-events, but compared to Xbox’s showcase I think this is going to be another disaster for PlayStation.
Gambon

Best in the game
Concord looks, uh… Okay, and that weird anime photo-click thing has something bizarre going on. Much of it was completely fine, with Silent Hill looking much stronger and more faithful to the original.

I would have said this was my favorite until the Astro Bot trailer, which looks completely insane and amazing, stole the title of ‘Best in Show’. Nice concrete release date too.

Overall, a fairly entertaining state of affairs
Wonk

Computer generated
I didn’t expect anything and the state of affairs still managed to disappoint. Astro Bot looked good, but everything else was offensively uninteresting. The worst was easily Concord, which was such a bland looking Overwatch clone, even the trailer was boring to watch.

Those dead eyes in all the characters’ faces was really bad and made the fact that they were desperately trying to look like Guardians Of The Galaxy even worse.

Concord looked like it was made by an AI, while what made Astro Bot so good was that it looked like it was made by a human with a real passion for what he does. It’s worrying how rare this is becoming among Western-made games, and here it’s the only Japanese-made game in Sony’s lineup that looks like it actually has life in it.

I’m not super optimistic about the Xbox event, but it will clearly be better than PlayStation’s, which made it feel like Sony was only doing it for contractual reasons and not anything else.
Leccy

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Product of its time
I’m pretty far behind on Edge issues, and I’m still reading one from last year, but this made me laugh. Last year they had a Time Extend feature for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door for GameCube and even though this year is the 20th anniversary of the GameCube release this year they still put this sentence in the article: ‘Flurrie, a diva actress whose character design is just one reason why we’re unlikely to see a Switch re-release anytime soon.’

I found that humorous, since GameCentral just reviewed the re-release on Switch!
Andreas J.
PS: I haven’t seen the Sora amiibo in stock yet, but I still check for them every day.

GC: Frankly, it seems unlikely even now.

I miss them all
I don’t remember you reviewing it, but I’m assuming you have a PlayStation VR2 setup? I know someone wrote about it last week, but I just played the Rez One of the best levels of any game I’ve played

Additionally, I experienced the first El Gigante boss in Resident Evil 4 VR and it was the most intense boss fight I have ever experienced. Looking up at that giant and trying to shoot him in the head, and the Plagas on his back were crazy. VR is one of those experiences that sounds rubbish when you talk about it and like the X-Wing mission, you just have to play it to understand how good it can be.
Simon

GC: We’ve reviewed a lot of PlayStation VR2 games and Rez is probably our most re-reviewed game ever?

Previous reasons
Although I’m getting the point out of the weekend reader feature, that games should ideally last no longer than 12 hours, there seems to be an overlooked reason why games have become so big… the second-hand trade-in market. Publishers knew that people would buy a game and trade it in a week later if it was a short single-player campaign. Which meant they wouldn’t make any money on these CeX type sales.

It seems that in response to this, games like Assassin’s Creed were deliberately designed to take longer to complete, in order to delay the time when such games would appear on the second-hand market (which would lead to lost revenue for Ubisoft, etc.).

Given the above, it’s clearly a bigger financial risk for publishers to release shorter games, no matter how attractive that is to us as consumers. However, with the physical games market somewhat dying out, there may be more room for shorter games in the future.
James Dixon

GC: That used to be a reason, but the second-hand market is now significantly smaller than it was ten years ago, both due to the rise of digital and the much more limited number of outlets dealing with it.

Inevitable fate
So what happens if (more likely when) Destiny 2: The Final Shape doesn’t do well? Destiny 2 has been going downhill for years and I really don’t see this expansion doing anything to reverse that.

I always liked the game but it lost its way and I don’t think they ever had a plan for it and were always making things up along the way – which finally caught up with them. The problem is that they are now owned by Sony and they have almost threatened to close them down. I expect more bad news before the fall.
Magnus

Pretty hardcore
If half of Sony’s audience is PlayStation 4 owners, why did they stop making games for it? I’m not saying I want to, but I don’t understand what the business case isn’t? The more things go wrong right now, the more it seems like the entire concept of console gaming doesn’t really make sense and needs to be completely rethought.

I think PlayStation and Xbox are trying to do that right now, but in such a clumsy, poorly thought out way that it just makes things worse.

The problem as I see it is that the entire concept behind consoles originated in the 16-bit era, when the PC was barely an afterthought. Nowadays, however, almost everything is available on PC, and often immediately. Granted, it doesn’t always work that well, but it’s all there and it seems very pointless to own a console.

Maybe casual gamers aren’t as aware of this fact, but looking at the numbers for consoles and PCs, I’m not sure if that even matters anymore.

As far as I can tell, casual gamers still only play two or three games (usually Call Of Duty, Fortnite and EA Sports FC), so even if you’re talking about something like Halo or Spider-Man, you’re still dealing with fairly hardcore gamers, and they know absolutely everything about the PC.

Microsoft is clearly already planning to move to a third party and I’m sure Sony won’t be that far behind. Maybe it will take another generation or two for them to accept the truth, but I’m not sure it will even take that long.
Brodie

Inbox is also running
I can’t believe there isn’t a nod to Chicken Police in your Duck Detective review. That’s criminal.
D Dubya

GC: We were more tempted to reference Duckman.

Silent Hill 2 certainly looked a lot better in the latest trailer, but I’m not convinced. The whole appeal of the game was that you had no idea what was going on, and if you played it all over again, even with better graphics and some new bits, it seems like it’s going to lose that appeal.
Doshin

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The small print
New Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic inboxes on weekends. Reader letters are used on a merit basis and can be edited for length and content.

You can also submit your own 500 to 600 word Reader Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which, if used, will appear on the next available weekend.