Seems like there are a lot of people worried about how the PlayStation brand seems to be headed down hill as of lately. Outside of the hardware sales, we are not happy with the lack of focus on the games from Sony. It is no longer early in the generation, as we are headed into our third year. It seems we have lost out on true gaming, only because Sony seems to be resting on their laurels due to the great hardware sales. Those sales will peak at some point, and then they won't have much left unless they make some drastic changes.
Looking at the most recent trend of everything gaming on our PlayStation, it seems very troubling. What we are noticing are a bunch of things that can be recovered from, but have put a definite impact on the PS brand.
- Lack of AAA exclusives, especially over the last 7 months. We had Until Dawn in August, then it wasn't until February that we received Street Fighter (and even that is multi platform, also on Microsoft Windows). Until Dawn gave us a lowly score of 79 on Metacritic with a luke warm reception. Street Fighter then lowered the bar with a dismal 77, and user scores that were half of that. Lack of content, broken online, average graphics, and sales that failed to match previous iterations. To top it off, we won't have our next exclusive until April, with Uncharted 4. That title has already been downgraded to 30fps single player, a less than stellar looking multiplayer and we only are being shown cut scenes in the trailers.
- When we do get exclusives, they are not even managing to do as well as comparable exclusives on the competing system. If we look at KI2 vs. SFV, it's a 85 vs 77. If we look at Forza Horizon 2 vs. DriveClub, it's 87 vs. 71. If we look at Halo 5 vs. Killzone 4, it's 84 vs. 73. Sunset Overdrive vs. Infamous is 81 vs 80. And where is our Gran Turismo, STILL? The last two GT's haven't matched the scores of Forza lately either.Then Rise of the Tomb Raider comes in, has great scores, great sales, wins graphics awards, story awards and character awards.
- Why are sales of games like Black Ops 3 and Star Wars doing better on the competing system, when Sony through all their marketing money into those games?
- They seem to be letting PSN sit still too with no sizeable improvements that have been requested time and time again. The dashboard seems to be sitting still, and the store is still a mess. And the titles we used to get for our plus sub have been less and less exciting and desired.
- Why were they relying so much on indie titles before, and now seem to have less of a focus on them, where is the competition seems to be bring back the focus in spades?
- Will we get some improvements in hardware such as better controller battery life, improved dpad, and a controller for tournaments?
- Why are we seeing more and more games being shared with PC, and more of their developers like SOE, Insomniac games going multiplatform? Exclusives like Rocket League going to competing platforms too.
What are your thoughts on this trend?
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