PlayStation has not had a great 2024. They did have the recent launch of the PlayStation 5 Pro, and the release of Helldivers 2 and Astro Bot, as well as a solid third-party schedule, as expected.
But this was also the year that they released Concord, and fired hundreds of employees, following the compromising leak from the Rhysida ransomware hack of Insomniac Games last year.
That included laying off developers from Insomniac, the most successful and hardworking studio that they have had in this console generation, as well as Bungie, in the fallout of a looming fiasco as the company realized they paid far more than the studio is now capable of delivering.
Some Sony fans reading this are likely tempted to tout talking points like Sony releasing exclusives in Stellar Blade, Black Myth Wukong, and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. If we were to be honest, Sony fans get more benefit from these games when they argue about them online, than Sony does itself.
But this is where the company and its fans converge, as the fans have been anticipating that Sony still has a big PlayStation Showcase to proverbially ‘save’ the year for them, as they say. As curated on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit by user Rubssi, fans remembered three different sources claiming such a Showcase event was coming for December.
Most recently, they took a tidbit from a deleted PlayStation ad as a hint that such an event was coming. That deleted ad seemed to suggest that an event was coming specifically on December 3, 2024, only three weeks from now. So did we get further confirmation that this event was on the way?
Here’s what Jeff Grubb said on Twitter:
“Don’t get your hopes up.”
Well, that douses everyone’s hopes, doesn’t it? But maybe Sony fans should learn a lesson from the Nintendo fans who were rabidly anticipating the reveal of their next upcoming console since this August.
Nintendo promised the reveal before the end of the fiscal year, and not that they would do it in this Roman calendar year. Subsequently, Sony didn’t drop any hints that they had any PlayStation Showcase events planned before the year ends either.
Sony is still in a good place now. Microsoft may have come out of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 making more money, but Sony definitely still got some profit out of it themselves, especially since it helped sell PlayStation 5 consoles.
Subsequently, even with all their struggles to enter live service, as well as their struggles to make it feasible to keep making their single player games, Sony is far from having to bow out of making consoles or being in the video game industry.
The truth is, Sony doesn’t see the situation the same way their fans do. They can’t worry about maintaining their online fanboy reputation on a monthly or daily basis, when many of their long-term plans from the past five years have been unraveling.
They have projects in the works now that they hope will land better, such as Ghost of Yotei, but the current moment is for Sony to regroup and to take stock of what steps they need to make next. Really, the last thing they need is to get fans disappointed over something they never said they were going to do.
That’s what Nintendo fans did to themselves, and they can’t blame any of that on Nintendo. Maybe Sony will have something they can share before the year ends, but that doesn’t mean you demand that their marketing team change up that plan that takes them months to lay out.
