MrGawain

It’s pretty obvious both Sony and Microsoft are in a holding pattern until the next console is ready to announce. There are games left to come and the core fans will eat it up but the magic hype has definitely gone. It wasn’t too long ago where Wii U owners were feeling deserted by the Nintendo PR department. Now the Switch is out and even with a dip in original titles, there is far more hype around the Switch than the PS4. I own both and I just feel more excitement for playing a year old indie port on the go, than Sony’s big autumn title that I’ve known about for two and a half years.

At some point PlayStation will bring its A game and I’ll be interested again, but at the moment it’s a distant 2nd to the white hot Switch.

Personally I don’t think the PS4 has had particularly good exclusives this gen compared to previous consoles. A lot of the different or kids stuff has been rather ‘meh’, and in recent years there’s been a reliance on sandbox games. Plus quite a few of these exclusives can be played on a PS3 if not so shiny. Separating the exclusives from the massive third party support really does show up a weakness.

Saying that, still leaps a bounds better than XB1. But nowhere as good as the Switch when it comes to diversity in game variety.

I wonder if this affects kickstarter? Essentially if you back a kickstarter you're pre-ordering a game before it's even in production.

I’m curious if he means multiplayer in an online COD/Halo/Battlefront way, or as in a Local Street Fighter/Mario Kart/FIFA sort of way?

Because the former makes you more money in micro transactions and PS subscriptions, where the other gets you more cred from Families and college students

Although I commend Sony in new IP (as in characters, worlds, etc), they are sort of playing it safe in the fact they make a lot of 3rd person open world/semi open world games with a lot of cg cutscenes. E3 highlighted the problem with 4 games that follow the template of that 3rd person open world. Dreams is the only thing in a while that doesn’t fit that formula (and I don’t think many people are aware of what that game is), and we get a few remasterers of stuff like Parappa and Medievil to mix it up- but they are not really risks being rereleases. For me personally I’m a little bored of the collectathon sandbox with 12 story chapters these days, and my PlayStation hasn’t been used to play games for a while.

The risk is not deviation, the risk is playing in the sandbox for too long.

@Paranoimia

“We’re never going to be like Nintendo, holding the lion’s share of the Nintendo platform game business, because that’s not the way we work,” he said, reinforcing the notion that Sony’s exclusives exist to complement its console’s catalogue of third-party titles. “We want to make the PlayStation platform available to all of our third-partners. I think we build success for PlayStation by getting as many people inside the tent as possible that aren’t necessarily controlled by Worldwide Studios.”

To me he's saying Nintendo is stifiling 3rd Party by being mean and releasing to many games in competiton. It's like he's talking to Ubisoft, EA, and Activision and telling them they'll get a fairer deal on PS4 than on the Switch. In reality loads of indie 3rd party games have done really well and Crash has just been a big seller on the Switch.

It just seems the sort of catty remark that I couldn't imagine Kaz Hirai or Andrew House making about the competition. It makes Layden seem like he's having to defend Sony against the first bit of competition they've had in 5 years.

For big good looking games with deep narrative for core games Sony wins.

For unique original games with fantastic control that anyone can play, Nintendo wins.

There are probably more Nintendo games released a year but they aren’t all Breath of The Wild. There is no need to have a measuring contest of who’s is bigger- If you like Sony buy Sony, if you like Nintendo, buy Nintendo, if you like both then pick and choose from both.

The real story here is why Layden feels the need to be so defensive about why Sony is better than Nintendo? They have the biggest selling console by a mile, these little jabs feels like he can feel Miyamoto breathing down his neck.

‘...the company wants to expand the spectrum of experiences on PlayStation, rather than double-down in categories already well serviced. “We’re not here to create games that steal market share from other publishers,” he concluded.’

So 90% of Sony’s output of recent games have been because 3rd party has been ignoring the Sandbox narrative genre?

Frankly I think what he’s saying is an insult to Sony’s first party studios. It implies they aren’t trying their hardest to create the best they can to give 3rd party a chance. Which is also an insult to 3rd party games as well.

I’m guessing it’s a thinly veiled jab at Nintendo for having first party games that dominate the sales on their systems, but to me all games are competition to each other- people will put their finite money in what they want the most. That doesn’t mean Nintendo should lower game production to force people to buy a 3rd party game in a different genre instead. If you’re spending your last £50 on Spider Man, you won’t be buying Red Dead, or COD, or 4 indie games for the same money. It’s the duty of the game publisher to have a good idea, execute it to the best of your ability so the customer gets a good game for their buck, and expect your competition to do the same.

would much prefer the sort of Final Fantasy Jam that you could spread on toast.

I can't believe this is coming to current gen consoles personally.

Who cares about how fast the graphics chip runs. Will the PS5 stop doing the beepy beep beep thing that ejects the cd?

I can remember a time when XBox was the dominant brand in gaming but then with few unpopular policies and some bad PR they lost it all and Sony stepped in. The same could be said with Nintendo with the N64.

Playstation should be wary of ignoring it's customers because there are no guarantees they'll continue their dominance with the PS5 if they fall into complacency and bullishness.

All those kids waking up on Christmas morning wanting to play a new game, only to find out it’s all been delayed to 2019 and they’ve got to sit around a Monopoly board instead.

Beyond the pacing of the conference, I couldn’t help but think that most of the games looked the same, with the same over the shoulder view point limited access sandbox with prompted cutscene with a bunch of excessive violence and murder.

For the people who like that stuff, it’s great, but I think the lineup doesn’t cater for everyone, especially a younger market. Plus a lot of it seems a long time off in the future.

It basically was some YouTube trailers stitched together. How that deserves a presentation is beyond me.

Also I think it’s pretty obvious there wasn’t Avengers or FFVII remake news because they aren’t coming in this decade.

Everyone is making a fuss that XB1 only has one 2018 exclusive left in Forza, but the real story is the PS4 has Spider-Man, and presumably/maybe Dreams and Medievil. Both systems are relying on the big 3rd party releases to keep us happy this year.

E3 isn’t an island on it’s own in the reveal ocean. All the Gamescons, and PS events, not to mention trailers and adverts that are put out there need footage and information that E3 used to have all to itself.

Plus I get the feeling the general consensus of gamers agree that the more information that is revealed for a game, the less amount of surprise and excitement we get once it’s in our hands. It’s great to know game X is coming and will have this gameplay and multiple whatever’s, but we don’t necessarily want to know all the secret characters and what all weapons are, and all the bosses and the what the maps look like.

I wonder if this means Ubisoft are scaling back on support for the Watch Dogs franchise?

Pretty sure you can't copyright a game mechanic, only names and likenesses. The Street Fighter/Fighter's History case pretty much wrote the rulebook on this.

As four games, they seem to be solid ones- far more than a certain other console has on the horizon. To me they seem to be cutting costs of appearances and dancers and musicians which will perhaps cut the waffle, andyou do sort of understand why the next run of reveals could possibly be for the PS5. But it all comes down to 2 questions for me:

A: How many of these games are coming before Christmas? Just Spider-Man?

And:

B: Why aren’t the rest of the exclusives we already know about being talked about?

So basically a Sony Direct in a cinema. Makes sense to me now.

It makes sense Sony haven’t got/aren’t willing to show 3 more years of games at a presser. You would think the PS5 will be along in say 2 years time, and will probably be shown next year. So with only a small amount of exclusives to show at e3 (leaving stuff for other conferences) do you A: want to spend millions having a show and B: show such a small amount in a traditional setting to rile fans.

They have 4 pretty good exclusives here to show which will keep people happy, but obviously don’t want to reveal what’s happening next year. Plus after selling 75 million consoles, perhaps they think they don’t need to have more exclusives to sell consoles, or maybe they think there isn’t that much more market for them to have?

I'm guessing I'm probably among the majority wondering if the white spider insignia was done to make him more visible, or if it was a design choice? Because I'm not completely sold....

The new (sensible) fashion for games marketing is not to announce your game unless it is guaranteed to come out in the next 12 months- preferably the next 6 months. Don’t think of it as Sony lacking now, think of all the lies and disappointments of PlayStation’s and XBox’s past E3 presentations. Was it just the amount of games Nintendo announced that was impressive in 2017- or the fact they all came out to the day they said they would? The rest of the games industry is just learning from this.

I have a theory Sony released the patch when it did to stop me from watching the Nintendo Direct on the YouTube app.

I would think the whole 'well it's exactly the same thing as trading cards or toys in a chocolate egg' argument woud legally protect these gaming companies, but if it didn't then I'm certain they could very easily rebrand the practise in some way and sell them differently.

The only real way to end added random microtransations is for a large percentage of their customers to stop buying the games that they're in.

The only reason Microsoft is doing this is because they're failing in the traditional retail games market. If you look at Netflix or Apple music, it's degraded the value of how much a piece of content is worth. On a small library of content that people may have stopped caring about this is 'money for old rope', but for something that is still selling- why would a company give it away for less?

Plus just because XB may have 5 exclusives in a year that you get for the price, doesn't mean you'll want to play all of them.

@TricksterTyler

Technically Gravity Rush 2, and the 6th Yakuza.

I wasn’t saying the PlayStation in 2017 didn’t have games- I played Nier and Horizon. But I did feel they fell in to a lot of the same traps that brown and grey open world games do (I didn’t even finish Horizon because of getting a bit bored). I felt Mario O and BOTW were complete reinventions of their series with new mechanics that were unique not just in their series but in gaming.

From a solely personal perspective, last year when I was standing in a games shop with £50 in my hand, I felt drawn to Nintendo over Sony more often than not. I went from buying 13 PS4 games in 2016, to just 3 this year (Nier and Horizon in a sale, Okami for £15).

I’m also not saying there will be be mass evacuations of players from PS4 to Switch, but for me personally I’ve had more fun on the Switch in the past 9 months and it’s caused me to view the PS4 as a Netflix and SKY player. I just would like something fun and weird that Sony can offer me that Nintendo can’t.

I think it’s fair to say Nintendo had a lot fresher 2017 than the PS4 just because it had titles we haven’t see for a while or at all (or most people haven’t because they didn’t buy a Wii U) The PS4 had good games, but it felt a bit same (A half Uncharted game, a remaster of Crash, a winter that was DLC for Horizon). Plus 3rd party like Battlefront 2, Destiny 2, Shadow of Mordor 2 and Assassins Creed 2000 and COD 4000. It just wasn’t as sparkly new as the Switch lineup.

Obviously a new Spiderman game and a reimagined God of War will help Sony next year, but I do think they need to promote a bit more off the wall original stuff so people (like me) don’t get complacent about the system.

I bought 2 games this year for the PS4- Nier Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn. Haven't finished either. Admittedly there has been a lot of titles for the system this year, but for me personally nothing has really grabbed me and the Switch and 3DS have my attention instead. Will hopefully get Okami PS4 for Christmas however.

I'm impressed by the amount of time they've supported FFIV, just a shame I finished it and deleted it from my hard drive 10 months ago.

I felt a bit guilty coming on here and listing Nintendo games, but it seems about half of you (or more) are doing the same thing. Fire Emblem Warriors, Xenoblade 2, Skyrim, LA Noire, Rocket League, Stardew Valley, a discounted Syberia, and Yooka-Lele are all awaiting me on the Switch, and MH Stories and Metroid on the 3DS.

I do want to play Okami on the PS4, but to do that something else has to come off the hard drive....

I still find it strange that after all these years PS doesn't have their immediately recognisable mascot like their rivals. XBox has Master Chief, Sega has Sonic, Nintendo has the mascot of all gaming Mario, but PS has yet to have that character that is unmistably the flag bearer. Even Nathan Drake is a little beige in that sense.

A lot of AAA games are deeply cutscene heavy lead, with pre-game credits with theme tunes, quicktime events and moments where a lot of control is taken away from the player. This works on a big telly made for TV and film experiences, but when you're on a bus, it A: loses impact, and B: takes you out of the moment, as you feel slightly ridculous tearing up over a NPC's death while sitting on the 286 bus.

Nintendo's games aren't that. It's all about control. Admittedly Zelda is a bit like that, but it doesn't have voice acting, and only happens at key points. The games that really work on the Switch are Mario, Stardew Valley, Rocket League, and Mario Kart 8, because in the 15 minute bus ride, or tea break, or waiting to pick the kids up, you don't want the control taken away from you from having a quick game. That's why I think most of the big games Sony have (or 3rd party AAAs) wouldn't work on the Switch.

It’s an odd way of explaining attach rates to make the numbers sound better. In reality there are about 65 million PS4’s sold. That means there are between 12 to 13 million PS4 pro’s out there.

PSVR has sold around 1 million. So 1 in 65 PS4’s is being used with a PSVR. I’d guess the attach rate for the Pro is around 1 in 15-20 which isn’t really a good attach rate. I would say the PS4 is a massive success, but PSVR definitely isn’t.

In a vacuum with no competition, I’d be pretty excited about the incoming PS4 games, but personally I find it hard to get excited about Sony’s stuff when Nintendo have been doing so well at distracting me. I like the look of the Shadow of the Colossus port, but I’m a little concerned how we keep seeing similar previews of Spider-Man and GOW. After Breath of The Wild and Mario, it’s all a little underwhelming at the moment.

I think Sony realised E3 wasn’t really well received by the fans- it wasn’t they had bad games, it’s just there wasn’t that earth shattering reveal we’ve all been addicted to. Plus they aren’t as shiny as Nintendo’s new toy at the moment. But I think in the long run managing our expectations and not letting the cat out of the bag 2 years too early will do everyone a favour. If they keep to revealing early 2018 content and dates with maybe a couple of hints for the long run, then they won’t burn out.

I get the feeling the whole industry is trying to shorten the announcement to release time of games at the moment. The delays, cancellations and downgrades we've seen to products from all publishers has damaged the interest of us customers.

Luckily for Sony, Microsoft has very little on the horizon to blow them out of the water at this time as they've delayed/cancelled everything. Unfortunately for Sony they now have Nintendo aparently clicking on all cylinders having hidden their lack of games during the end of the Wii U and are now fully loaded with the Switch.

Okami and Shadow of the Collossus interest me, but lets be honest they're ports/remasters.

This is the first PS4 I've been excited about buying since last Christmas. Count me in.

I can't think of many consoles (aside from the N64), where the traditional controller wasn't the best.

But this is just designed to lure XB players who don't like the PS controller.

Although this argument does apply to a lot of modern PS and XB games, you can argue that the sound effects, music, and mixing of Nintendo games are part of popular culture. Just SMB alone has the sounds of jumps, coins, and mario growing/shrinking, 3 or 4 iconic stage themes; the star music, and the end stage music, and the fact the music speeds up when you're running out of time.

And don't get me started on Zelda, Mario Kart, the Wii UI screen, Donkey Kong, Pikmim, and even the click when you connect the switch controllers....

I don't fork out for online multiplayer on the PS4, so I'm guessing this doesn't apply to me?

Currently watching my nephew play Crash on my PS4 after he couldn't get it on launch day as it was sold out. I'm reminded how much of a headache it gave me with the original on the ps1- something to do with the camera? Plus some of the jumps and villains are excessively unfair.

As for Splatoon 2, it's been a real joy to play it over the weekend.- a really special game.

@nathanSF

I get the feeling they're trying to keep us interested in the PS4 brand during a relative dry spell for them when everyone is talking about Nintendo who have had recently/are soon getting some really big titles. If you spend your alotted cash on the PS4 store and have lots to play, you probably aren't going to invest in a Switch as well.

If you can find one, that is.

All these sort of sales do is make me refuse to buy new games. if they drop in price 3 to 6 months after release, then end up under a tenner after a couple of years, I don't see the point of day one-ing anything any more.

I've just bought Shadow of Modor GOTY edition from Amazon. The price was £13.61.

Immediately after I received an e-mail saying they had dropped the price to £13.60. With this and 75% of Horizon still to play, plus Arms and Everton Oasis I think I'll be good through July.

I still remember the migraine from playing it the first time. Pass.

Note it doesn't say what they smell of.

If you want reality then they should smell of beefburgers, off milk, and shame.