The state of the console industry is curious in every way imaginable. Xbox may or may not be on its last legs, depending on how you look at things, with the system losing lots of exclusives and potentially dropping even more to other systems this year. Nintendo just announced its newest console, the Switch 2, and people are already overanalyzing every bit of the 2-minute reveal trailer to see what will and won’t be part of the system, and then there’s the PlayStation brand. It’s doing well sales-wise with the PS5, but if you’re wondering what many think about it almost five years into its lifespan, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
On the one hand, no one can deny that the PS5 is an incredibly powerful console that plays games beautifully. It has the hardware to go all out, and it doesn’t hide it. Sure, it needed a “PS5 Pro” model for one reason or another, but no matter which version you get, your games will look great on it. The question that brings us to today’s post is, “What games are you actually playing on it?” Sony hasn’t been the best when it comes to exclusive titles, especially in the last year or so, and that’s gotten the attention of many people, including Shuihei Yoshida, who recently left Sony after 31 years with the company. He was also the former head of PlayStation Studios, the gaming line’s first-party branch.
He noted that before he left the first-party branch to go work with the indie branch that there were limited resources to do things like live-service titles, and that the moment he left, his replacement got the greenlight to go and do live-service games in greater number. Yoshida specifically noted that if he had still been head of the first-party branch at that time, he would’ve “resisted” the push into the live-service market and focused instead on the games that helped make the Sony line of systems popular.
To be clear, Yoshida also highlighted the success of certain games in the live-service branch, like a certain one from Arrowhead Games, but he’s not wrong about the risks that Sony has been taking with this particular line of titles. It’s already canceled six such live-service games despite promising to have over a dozen of them ready by 2026. Plus, while a certain game from “Super Earth” was massively popular, a certain other one was canceled just 2 weeks into its launch.
One can only wonder what would’ve happened if Yoshida didn’t leave his post when he did.
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