Between closing PixelOpus and its refocus on live-service titles, PlayStation is losing the eccentric spirit that helped establish the brand.
While PlayStation continues to thrive thanks to big-budget games like God of War Ragnarok, two recent events show how much Sony’s video game brand is changing. The first came when the Sony-owned studio Media Molecule would end support for Dreams, a PS4-exclusive experience creation tool allowing players to build and share games with one another, later this year.
Related Imagination nation The PlayStation brand didn’t always use to be synonymous with big-budget, third-person, single-player narrative adventure games. That change would only come during the PS3 generation with the success of series like Uncharted. Prior to that, first-party Sony exclusives tended to be more varied or experimental.
Looking forward, PlayStation has shown no indication of serving up these weirder titles in a major way. Astro’s Playroom being packed in with the PS5 gave some hope, but we’ve seen little in that same vein over the past few years. The fact that Fantavision 202X, the sequel to a first-party PS2 launch title, was released for PSVR2 without PlayStation publishing it shows its lack of commitment to the kind of diverse games that made its previous consoles unique.
That’s a tactic it’s already employing using other studios’ games, beginning with the indie hit Stray, and the recent example of Tchia, both launching as day-one additions to the service. There’s an opportunity here for Sony to fill its service with its own smaller, first-party games that wouldn’t need to be sales behemoths to provide value to the brand.
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