We have a rumor suggesting that Sony has scheduled a State of Play, and the timing seems to be particular.
Jeff Grubb had tweeted out, in response to news of the price increases for PlayStation Plus, that:
“I’ve heard a State of Play is coming, and this feels like a lead-in for that.”
Over the past day since Sony announced the price increase, Twitter had gone abuzz over the name of Sony’s current CEO, Jim Ryan. A lot of those tweets have not been polite, but for a reasonable criticism we will share this comment from Twitter user OverXposure:
“One thing I’ve learned underneath the leadership of Jim Ryan, Hermen Hulst is that the communication with the core fanbase is the worst it’s ever been. We are being left in the dark with their studios and we have 0 SP first-party titles set to release after SM-2. Unbelievable.”
As we had reported yesterday, Sony also announced a raise in prices for PlayStation Plus 12-month subscriptions alongside revealing the upcoming games for PlayStation Plus in September. Now, to be clear, even with the higher prices, it will still be cheaper to get a 12-month subscription than to renew every month or every three months. The markup on the monthly and three month rates are still higher when you add up those months compared to what you would pay for a 12-month subscription.
As for Jim Ryan, there may be something to complaints that he hasn’t put on a good face for Sony fans recently. As we know, Jim signed the Microsoft ten year contract for Call of Duty games, after spending over a year trying to curtail their efforts to close their Activision merger. Of course, as a PlayStation user, this should be good news. But for the fans who are emotionally attached to the brand, they were embarrassed by the end result of Jim’s actions.
Jim has also more directly antagonized Sony fans. There was the botched communication over whether Jim cares about older video games, like those PlayStation made themselves. And then there are the divisive decisions when it comes to live service games, PlayStation VR 2, and the recently revealed PlayStation Portal. It’s not that Sony has not made flubs before, but Sony under Jim’s leadership in particular is both doing a poor job selling their ideas to fans, and also doing damage control and reputation management.
In any case, whether a new State of Play will make fans happy will be entirely dependent on what we will see in it. If it will be the big marketing push for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and has a lot of new unseen footage in it, that could do the trick. But if Sony doesn’t show anything fans will really be excited for, it probably won’t. We’ll just have to wait and see if this rumor is even true.
