How SONY & Playstation Ruined Gaming
In 1994, the SONY Playstation was released to the world and a turning point was reached for the entire gaming sphere. Whilst previous attempts at a CD-based console had proven total failures, SONY themselves seemed the perfect candidate to succeed, having had a hand in creating the CD technology in the first place. The PS1 proved the catalyst for an explosion in gameplay innovations and new ideas, so much so I am still discovering amazing PS1 games today that I never got a chance to play back then. Final Fantasy VII developers famously said that the game would have simply been impossible to make on any other console, and it wasn't like when they say stuff like that today and it's a blatant lie. Back then, it was the genuine truth. The Playstation was great for gaming...for a time, but nowadays, I believe SONY is complicit in a declining games industry and whilst not quite as damaging as Microsoft over the years, has still pretty much ruined gaming.
SONY has always been a tech company at the absolute forefront of the industry. As I said, they had a huge hand in developing CD, DVD and blu-ray which, let's face it, are amazing technologies that most people couldn't imagine life without even decades after they were first unveiled. Sony makes great TVs, industry-leading cameras and it has always been a policy of theirs to put a percentage of their profits into R&D.
However, Sony have gone to extreme lengths to create unintuitive and unnecessary hardware in the hopes that it will be yet another industry standard. Of course, this applies to minidisc but in terms of gaming, the PSP's UMDs were a main culprit. Having a spinning disc inside a handheld console was a needless battery drain and also made loading times on PSP a chore. Cartridge is clearly a superior format for handhelds, but SONY couldn't resist pushing yet another format of their own design onto the consumer and with it, came millions of UMD movies which nobody wants, because nobody wants to watch a movie on PSP...unless it's Advent Children...but even then the extended Blu-Ray makes it obsolete so fuck UMD's, they suck.
This is not the only instance of Sony attempting to monopolise hardware by a long shot. Despite SD cards already having been a convenient and universal form of media storage for years, Sony decided to inconvenience their customers further by having the PSP only accept Sony's own form of removable storage. Obnoxiously titled the "Memory Stick Pro Duo." Granted, SONY had been using these as native storage solutions in their cameras before PSP, but that hardly makes it better now does it? In fact, the situation only got worse when the PS VITA was released, requiring a completely different type of memory stick, which also happened to be insanely expensive.
The catalyst for most of the issues I want to discuss is without a doubt the PS3. I mentioned in my video on XBOX that the PS3 gets a bad rap due mainly to the propaganda machine of supremely corrupt mid 2000s games journalism. I personally have really fond memories of playing PS3 but make no mistake, the PS3 is an absolute disaster of a games console, though perhaps not for the reasons you'd expect.
First off, this marks the point in history where games companies realised they could literally just say anything about a game in development and misrepresent pre-rendered cutscenes as gameplay at no consequence. Xbox did have a hand in this by moving the paradigm of gaming to one ever more focused on graphics but SONY absolutely led the charge on lying to their customers about what their games were going to actually play like on the PS3. The most famous example being their trailer for Killzone which turned out to be fake from start to finish. Hideo Kojima brilliantly made fun of this with his MGS4 reveal trailer, which was without a doubt the most stunning looking game at the time. You almost didn't believe it was real, but of course, Metal Gear fans knew Kojima didn't use pre-rendered cutscenes and proving what was possible showed up both SONY and other developers. However, when the game finally released, other than the improved controls and undeniably gorgeous graphics, the gameplay was sorely lacking any meaningful innovations like previous games in the franchise.
The PS3 was obviously a powerful console in the right hands, but whereas in the PS1 era, SONY seemed like it was welcoming developers with open arms, something obviously went seriously wrong here as many developers reported that it was notoriously difficult to code for. I had previously again blamed propaganda and the dominance of Xbox for this as a console that could run stunningly beautiful games like MGS4 and Uncharted 3 flawlessly couldn't be that messed up could it? but I think an alternative explanation is probably closer to the truth. SONY weren't accommodating to developers in the same way they used to be, they didn't care if they had done something unorthodox to achieve the PS3 and weren't willing to actually work with developers or provide tools to make development on the console easier.
This uncaring attitude carried through to multiplatform 3rd party games. Most egregious for me is Skyrim which to this day constantly freezes on PS3. Sony was ambivalent to this lack of quality on their platform compared to the Xbox which had become the default platform for game development. SONY should have done more in these instances to either force the company to fix the issues otherwise be disallowed from the platform, or like I said before, work with the developers and get stuck in fixing things with them.
SONY were also happy to coast along whilst the franchises that took them to the top were being farmed out to Microsoft. This isn't an exclusivity issue, I have no problem with multi-platform games. This is merely the fact that Playstation was a custodian of sorts for the likes of Spyro, Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider. But in the PS3 days, it was like SONY were asleep at the wheel. Oh Microsoft just made a deal to get an entire exclusive level for the criminally short Tomb Raider Underworld? Who cares? The guys who made Final Fantasy want to leave to form their own XBOX first-party studio and make JRPGs exclusively on the Xbox? Well, it's a terrible idea but let em, we have God of War. 2 of our most iconic games franchises which most see as synonymous with Playstation have been left stagnating for years under Activision? Well, why have Spyro and Crash when you can have God of War 3 and God of War...the other one that was on PS3. Put simply, during this time Playstation could have done so many things to breathe life into the gaming industry, but most of the time it felt like they were shrugging their shoulders whilst the world burned around them.
In some cases, SONY pissed off and betrayed studios so much it practically forced them to go to Microsoft in the hopes of a better offer. Whilst Insomniac was never officially a first-party studio, they nevertheless had a close relationship for years. Insomniac created massive iconic franchises for SONY only to be told time and time again that they don't own the rights to any of it. SONY wanted full control of Ratchet and Clank and Resistance, and after Insomniac had already been shafted out of the rights to Spyro the Dragon, this was the last straw. Ninja Theory has a similar story, creating incredible tech that showcased the potential of next gen mocap and storytelling in Heavenly Sword. However, Ninja Theory had made an extremely unfavourable deal with SONY as they were on the verge of bankruptcy, and every bit of tech they worked on was kept by SONY...kept, for them to do absolutely nothing with.
It was such a shitty thing to do to a struggling studio, especially one as talented and boundary-pushing as this, and if SONY were to have put some work in themselves rather than contributing only money and taking everything the studio worked for, it could have been a fantastic pairing. I have to mention though, that despite both companies complaining endlessly about how SONY exploited them, they still returned to create Playstation-exclusive games in the future. I think both XBOX and Playstation are as bad as each other in this regard but Ninja Theory had the ambition to be a leading developer and push tech to new heights, they couldn't do that as an indie developer on the verge of bankruptcy. It's definitely a problem and it's a problem inherent to the capitalist system we are trapped in, however, Ninja Theory especially seemed willing to make a deal with the devil to bring their vision to life so I don't feel that bad for them in the end. Especially as founder Tameem Antoniades, despite painting a picture that the company has always been on the precipice of bankruptcy, now lives in a giant London penthouse. How does that happen?
I have been critical of the Xbox 360's inexcusably bad failure rate. The 360 encountered what has become known as the red ring of death at somewhere approaching 50% So whereas I have only ever had one of each console barring the time I was robbed and the time my dad accidentally kicked my PS1 across the floor, chances are if you owned an Xbox 360, you've either had to get it repaired or buy a whole new Xbox 360. However, SONY had a very narrow escape with the PS3 which could have easily led to a disaster on the same scale. They skimped on the material quality of the original PS3, which by the way was the most expensive console of all time up til that point, and high temperatures of the console running led to the CPU cracking and the equally ominous Yellow light of death. (I once read that this was mainly an issue outside of Japan but cannot find anything to confirm this) This again screams "does not care" to me. They have the cheek of charging a 16-year-old me £600 of my hard-earned money I got as compensation from a car accident I was in, only to have a component melt randomly. I have rarely been so furious as when this happened to me and in fact, I took a long break from gaming, perhaps the longest I have ever taken. I was that heartbroken with SONY.
Yet there's even more to be annoyed about with PS3. Once I started this YouTube channel and got my overpriced yet obligatory Elgato capture card, I noticed something strange. The card simply wouldn't recognise the HDMI input from the PS3. A quick Google search later, oh right, SONY purposely encrypted the HDMI signal from the PS3 to stop people from recording and uploading Blu-rays to the internet. How smart that it also works the same for games. No wonder all these game journalists were playing on Xbox, SONY had made it an absolute ballache for them to do their jobs by capturing footage of games on the PS3! Granted, there are workarounds to this, but it was such an unnecessary limitation, especially considering if I wanted to pirate a Blu-ray, I would probably just get a Blu-ray drive and rip it to a PC extremely easily. Not play it through my PS3 and record it with a capture card. Ridiculous.
When the PS3 was first released, people were able to install Linux on it as a regular and advertised feature of the console as it had been with PS2. Yet as SONY became increasingly paranoid about PS3s being hacked and modded, the feature was removed in a 2010 update. This triggered a class action lawsuit against SONY, resulting in a loss of millions that could have been spent on game development.
It stopped the the jailbreakers from hacking and modding the PS3 though right? No, of course not. Within 3 weeks of the update the PS3 was cracked as previously uninterested coders found a new not-so-challenging-challenge. Meanwhile, the lawsuit dragged on for years, inducing insane legal fees on top of the money SONY had to pay out in the settlement.
What made Playstation so successful in its formative years was the absolute laser focus on having the best games and allowing developers to utilise the power of the playstation to its fullest. This even came in the form of a budding console indie and homebrew scene with PS1's Net Yaroze. Playstation actively encouraged amateur coders to release their games on the playstation. Everything changed with the PS3. It seemed despite the potential of a now online console for indie developers to shine, Playstation no longer really cared about the games. Increasing focus was put on gimmicks and marketing.
Sony executives have hilariously claimed many times over the years that Playstation is not interested in gimmicks and Nintendo and Microsoft are not even competition in their eyes. However, once the Wii turned out to be a mind-boggling success due to everyone's mum's buying one to play Wii fit one time then never turn it on again, Sony desperately scrambled to copy the Wii in as many ways as they could. This led to an egregious focus on Playstation move games for what seemed like an eternity. Nobody cared about these games, people were laughing at the absurdity of the PS Move controller and in the end, what SONY fans got was an avalanche of shovelware games on the system that were all trying to glom on to the Wii's success.
If you ask me, the Sixaxis controller which launched with the PS3 is a direct result of this attempt to copy the Wii in every way they could. Now, I think the Sixaxis, or probably more so, the rumble-enabled DualShock 3, is a mind-blowingly good controller. My favourite behind the Gamecube's and my go-to controller for playing most games. But when this first came out, with all the hype around its motion controls, the thing just sucked. It felt light as a feather, despite the point being to immerse the player and the things it was used for in the vast majority of games were just mind bogglingly stupid additions that not only felt like they were forced in by Sony but if the option to turn them off presented itself in any game, you were guaranteed to take that option.
I'm talking about things like balancing your character on beams, extremely unresponsive steering for driving sections, or Uncharted's option to flick the controller up to throw grenades back at enemies when you could do the same thing by moving your finger slightly to press a single button. Now there were maybe two games that used the Sixaxis in an innovative, satisfying and simply well-designed way. Namely Folklore and Locoroco Cocorecho, the latter of which is not even a full game, more of a tech demo...but that's the problem, SONY were no longer interested in fostering a platform of good game design. They wanted motion controls, so they told developers to add motion controls to their games and it was an absolute kick to the balls of the games industry for years to come.
SONY lost me once and for all when they decided to start charging to play online. Not that I ever really played online much to begin with, but at the time I wanted to play Dissidia NT and felt like I had basically been charged twice, then ended up only playing Dissidia for a couple of weeks because the PS4 game was nowhere near as good as a PSP game released 7 years prior. Imagine that. Anyway, since then I've mainly been playing PS1 or PC games which makes it very frustrating that it's only very recently Playstation has recognised that PC is even a thing. At the time, I felt forced to buy PS4 as I wanted to play the Yakuza games but now they're on everything and my PS4 is basically only good for blocking Xbox mind control rays. I thought I wanted PS4 to play other niche Japanese titles but then quickly realised that most of them are garbage, unless you want a game where you run around a Japanese high school with a magic gun that shoots women's clothes off. Which yeah, I really thought I wanted this game at the time.
SONY's overall lack of PC support, which includes lack of cross-play, is just another side effect of Sony closing themselves off during those PS3 years where they initially marketed it as a really powerful PC yet with none of the benefits that a PC has and the result is that many games including Metal Gear Solid 4 and more importantly Drakengard 3 feel stranded on that console.
Yet as we continue on to PS4 and PS5, the amount of games and especially the amount of good games we have is getting less and less. I find myself wholly uninterested in 99% of the stuff on PS5 and Xbox New one. The 1% I am interested in? Well, the Tomb Raider Remastered Trilogy looks cool. Yeah, I joke a lot about PS5 having no games, but it makes it doubly hilarious that the best games on the system are going to end up being remakes of PS1 titles. Because, just like Xbox, Playstation are not interested in innovating gameplay and delivering gamers new and unique experiences.
When Mark Cerny announced the PS5 he claimed the SSD would allow just that...despite citing tech that has been around since PS2 and a similar technique that the Decima engine already used perfectly fine on PS4's hard drive. (The ability to render graphics on the fly depending on where the player was looking.) Yet still we see an absolute drought of new and interesting ideas. I mention all this in my video on the PS5 announcement but again, there were 5 Tomb Raider games on PS1, each one pushing the capabilities of the console further and further with its engine. Core design created many other different games, however. Yet Sony Santa Monica seems content to release ONLY God of War games and has only ever released God of War aside from their first game Kinetica on PS2.
SONY has always arrogantly acted as if they were above everyone else in the industry while chasing all the same trends. They have fully bought into the graphics over gameplay paradigm rather than fostering gameplay innovation in their first-party studios, as they did so perfectly with Psygnosis in the PS1 era. Bringing out a wide variety of games for the system. Naughty Dog, arguably their best studio, seems content to do similar to Santa Monica, except they go back and forth between Uncharted and Last Of Us, both 3rd person-cover shooters with stealth elements. Sure, they only released Crash Bandicoot games on PS1 but that was a single generation, and included a kart racer and a brawler. They've now been bringing out the same games for 3 console generations. There was so much SONY could have done over the years to retain some of their former glory, the least of which should have been safeguarding the franchises that put them on the map in the first place. Instead, they have done and continue to do, less than nothing towards a healthy gaming industry. The PS5 is a pointless and expensive bit of hardware, and although I value physical media, I am not willing to buy into it just for the Yakuza series which can now be played on PC, as all games should. PS4 had no games, PS5 has no games and so I'll say the same thing I said about XBOX, when Playstation start focusing on bringing out great games, that's when I'll be interested.