A reader explains why they never got a PS5 and how they fear the PS6 will suffer from all the same issues that convinced them not to upgrade from a PS4.
I’m not usually what you would call an early adopter. Like most of us, I always have a massive backlog of games but I’m also not a big fan of being a Guinea pig for companies, if there happens to be a problem with the hardware. But mostly it’s just because there’s usually nothing much of interest at launch and if you wait a few years things get cheaper too.
I’m one of those people that are still playing my PlayStation 4. I was planning my usual thing of getting a next gen console about two years in, but when that time came around for the PlayStation 5, that’s exactly when Sony stopped making single-player games.
The problem now, is that there’s already talk of the PlayStation 6 and yet at the same time there’s no sign that Sony is going back to anything close to how they used to make games. So even if I did get the PlayStation 6 on day one, to compensate for skipping a generation, I’m not sure we’re going to be in a better a situation.
They say that Microsoft is trying to kill the concept of exclusives but to me Sony is doing much more damage, simply because nobody has an Xbox anyway, so it doesn’t really matter what they do. But PlayStation 5 is the default console of the generation and all it’s doing is teaching Sony that they don’t need exclusives to sell their consoles. And if they don’t need them then no one else does either (except Nintendo, but I’ll get to them in a minute).
If that’s the obvious lesson from the PlayStation 5, and it is showing no sign of changing, then why would things be any different on the PlayStation 6? From Sony’s perspective it just doesn’t make any sense spending hundreds of millions of dollars on making a AAA game, only to make a tiny profit or even a loss – as happened with Spider-Man 2.
They’ll keep making live service games, I’m sure, but they’re all going to be on PC day one or soon after anyway. Either way, the idea that exclusives sell consoles is being broken down.
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I’m not the first one to point this out and the usual solution I see from other people is either a PC or a Switch (2 now, I suppose). But I don’t want either. I respect Nintendo – more than I respect Sony – but I still don’t really like most of their games. And I hate the idea of having to constantly upgrade a PC and the general difficulty of getting games to work on it and the fact that they’re not well optimised even after that.
Perhaps I will have to force myself to learn to live with a PC but – and I think this is the heart of the problem for many people – I was very happy with my PlayStation 4. Its graphics were great, its line-up of games was fantastic, and it had plenty of top notch exclusives.
For me it was the perfect console and it did not need replacing, not for the paltry improvements offered by the PlayStation 5. But if they were going to do it, it needed to learn all the tricks of the PlayStation 5 and amplify them. Instead, it ripped them out and trod them into the dirt.
I don’t see any reason to believe the PlayStation 6 will be any different and that worries me. Not just for the sake of the console itself but whether I’m losing my love for gaming, not wanting to put up with Sony’s nonsense. In my opinion it’s all their fault, and I can’t believe that I’m the only one who is beginning to feel very disenfranchised by the whole PlayStation brand.
By reader Sagashow
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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