GoKawiilThings are bad out there.
That all makes it a somewhat awkward time for Summer Game Fest, a weeklong spectacle of events that kicks off on Tuesday. Splashy announcements won’t do much to stem the negative sentiment around the industry. But given the challenging state of console gaming in particular, both Microsoft and Sony have an opportunity to show players just why they should buy these increasingly expensive boxes.
Let’s start with Sony. On June 2nd, the company will livestream its latest State of Play with “over 60 minutes of news and announcements for games coming to PS5,” headlined by Insomniac’s Wolverine, which launches in September.
Sony is dealing with two major issues at the moment. One is that the PS5 is simply too expensive: A base console cost $499 at launch, and it has since jumped to $649, while the most expensive model is a whopping $899. That steadily rising price has had a major impact, with PS5 sales dropping by nearly 50 percent year over year. Sony has recently shifted its strategy back to focusing on console exclusives, after a few years of dabbling in PC gaming, and it’ll need a few big ones to sell people on a PS5 at its current price point.
Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
The problem is not just that there is only so much room for games in the live-service space. It’s also that Sony largely built its modern reputation on lavish single-player titles. People buy a PlayStation to play God of War or The Last of Us, not the ill-fated Concord or whatever Fairgames is. The State of Play needs to make it clear that Sony has moved on from those mistakes, and is ready to focus on what it does best. A Wolverine game from the team behind Spider-Man is a good start, and we already know The Last of Us studio Naughty Dog is working on a new sci-fi universe. But Sony will need more than that to reestablish PlayStation as the home of these premium experiences.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
SGF would be an ideal place to show that. Microsoft’s event — dubbed the Xbox Games Showcase, and airing on June 7th at 1PM ET — quite simply needs to have games, and games that you can only play on an Xbox. The company has actually been on a fairly strong run recently, launching everything from the open-world racer Forza Horizon 6 to the goofy competitive game Kiln. But if you’re going to hail this moment as the “return of Xbox,” which Sharma has done, you’re going to need a lot more than that to make a statement. That means the big games we already know about — Fable, Gears of War: E-Day, the Halo remake — as well as surprises.
Xbox and PlayStation aren’t the only ones struggling right now. Virtually everyone, from major publishers to indie studios, is feeling the crunch in some way. Nintendo, which often operates in its own parallel universe, has had to alter its approach to deal with these outside forces, while Valve has similarly seen its grand hardware plans disrupted. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the elephant in the room, Grand Theft Auto VI, which launches in November and will likely lead to some kind of surge of console sales, which is a temporary relief.
But the stakes are particularly high for Sony and Microsoft. We’re six years into the current generation of game consoles, which is typically when those devices have hit a stride and people start wondering what comes next. And while there has already been talk of a PS6 and Xbox’s “Project Helix,” there’s also very little buzz around either, which is not a surprise given how things are going right now. Just thinking about how much a next-generation game console might cost is enough to scare off anyone.
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