A reader is unimpressed by the recent performance of Sony and Microsoft and argues they’ve done nothing to make 2023 a good year for games.
I have to admit, the fact that so many video game developers are losing their jobs this year is something that had largely passed me by until this month. Ironically, it wasn’t until people started complaining that The Game Awards had ignored the subject (and given developers too little time to talk on stage) that I began to take notice, and then I read GC’s excellent article on the current state of the industry and why so many people are being made redundant.
It made the point that while we all sit back and enjoy this year’s bumper crop of games, the people that make them are all sitting there fearing for their jobs. Not just indie studios but everyone from Naughty Dog and Bungie to 343 Industries. It’s not the decision makers that caused the problems that are in trouble, just the people that were forced to carry out their orders.
That led me to realise that no matter how good this year has been for games there’s two companies that have had virtually nothing to do with it: Sony and Microsoft. The volume of their output this year has been nothing short of pathetic and their constant mistakes and missteps make you wonder how either of them have made it this far.
Microsoft has spent the GDP of a small country (I looked it up, Luxembourg’s is $85.51 billion) on buying up developers and so far they’ve got diddly squat out of it. Sales of the Xbox have gone down this year, not up, and after all the fuss and hype Starfield turned out to be nothing more than a wet fart of a game. Their best game this year was the digital-only Hi-Fi Rush, that they barely did any marketing for, and they somehow managed to make Forza Motorsport even more boring than Gran Turismo.
Admittedly, they are now the world’s biggest publisher, by virtue of buying Activision Blizzard, but none of that stuff is exclusive so that doesn’t help Xbox, it just brings in money for Microsoft as a whole. Maybe being on Game Pass next year will help but nothing else that’s ever happened with Game Pass (or PS Plus) has ever pushed the needle, so I don’t think there’s much reason to expect this to be any different.
All those 10s of billions of dollars and they’re still in last place, and falling, with next to no good exclusives and a boss that, for a decade now, has been promising next year will be the moment things change, even though it never does.
At least Xbox has a boss though, that isn’t scared to appear on camera. I doubt most PlayStation owners have any idea who Jim Ryan is or the fact that he’s leaving next year. And it’s increasingly looking like he’s been booted out too, after his plans for a dozen live service games in three years was shot down in flames before it even got into the air.
This week’s announcement from Naughty Dog, about the cancellation of The Last Of Us Online was absolutely bizarre; it sounded almost like a mutiny, a deceleration of independence from the idea of having to make live service games anymore.
Four years they’ve wasted on making that game, that will never come out, and we can only assume other Sony developers are in a similar position, because they haven’t announced anything new in ages either.
Sony has done absolutely nothing this whole year, except sit on their hands and release Spider-Man 2 – which was in development long before the live service obsession started. They even managed to release the PlayStation VR2 in February and not announce one other single new game for it since then, just letting other publishers support it. Not even the PS Vita had it that bad from them.
I remember those naïve days when people thought that Sony’s silence was some kind of 4D chess game with Microsoft, while they were stuck in their legal case over Activision Blizzard. But that wasn’t what was going on at all. It just turned out Sony were incompetent fools. They both are, them and Microsoft.
If I sound angry it’s not out of some sort of fan outrage – I own both consoles – it’s because this incompetence is costing people their jobs. Over 9,000 so far this year, and while that’s not just at Sony and Microsoft they’re supposed to be the leaders of the industry, leading by example. Instead, they just bumble along like a teenager using their parent’s credit card and not caring about the consequences at all.
There’s no way 2023 can be considered a great year with these sorts of things going on but even if you somehow ignore them, none of the positives have anything to do with Microsoft or Sony. The games industry deserves better than these two in charge and yet apart from Nintendo, who are just happy to do their own thing, there is no alternative.
I always used to think that Google and Amazon and whoever else would be even worse than the current status quo, but now I’m not sure that’s even possible…
