Live service, but also smaller games?
The State of Play which was staged last May 30th, and of which you can find a report here, disappointed many, if not everyone, although the premises suggested a series of trailers and announcements contained in the ambitions of the projects involved. Since it is not a Showcase, an event in which what are called bombs in jargon are reserved par excellence, it was legitimate to contain the hype and reduce expectations, although it was equally necessary expect news from Sonyconsidering that no publications of a certain depth are expected in the immediate future.
It wasn’t the case to expect the new The Last of Us, of course, but it’s perhaps too much to ask of just one Astro Bot to overturn the judgment of the State of Play, expecting it to be able to shoulder all the hopes and dreams of the spectators. In short, the pepper was missing, but upon closer inspection, not the salt. Both because there have been intriguing and tantalizing titles, and because, filtered through a different lens, this digital conference has a lot to tell us about future not only of Sony, but of the entire industry.
There is no point in spending more words than necessary on the current state of the gaming sector. Massive layoffs, canceled games, a general sense of uncertainty that goes hand in hand with statistical data that underlines how the new generations conceive this medium in a completely new way, compared to how we have understood it up to now. We are experiencing a period of tumultuous transition and it will be up to the main players in the industry to rearrange themselves if they don’t want to run into big trouble, although the global data is far from disappointing in terms of profits.
Nintendo, which in some ways lives in the future, sensed the existence of this bottleneck already about twenty years ago, when completely changing its approach, it abandoned the pursuit of realistic graphics and specialized in productions that could live in symbiosis with the hardware on which they were published. An idea that was perhaps too visionary at the time, which was introduced when technological progress could actually exist without weighing excessively on costs and development times, but which with hindsight acquires a completely different weight.
While Sony and Microsoft, despite being able to count on many more resources and development teams, have not yet managed to get their “next-gen” off the ground, which after four years of next seems to have less and less, Nintendo can decide with all calm of the world when to debut the successor to the Switch, waiting to have enough irons in the fire to worthily accompany its debut on the market.
Yet, we were saying, the State of Play of May 30th perhaps brings some signal of change of Sony and, perhaps, of the entire industry in terms of development strategy and creation of the games of tomorrow.
Concord himself also tells us about a Sony attracted and directed towards live services, a curse and delight for publishers all over the world
First of all, it now seems completely cleared through customs the multiplatform approach. After Microsoft broke the deadlock by bringing some of its productions to Sony consoles, the Japanese giant first began with PC transpositions of the best games that appeared on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, but now it is aiming directly at publication on both platformsas the future testifies I agreea 5vs5 hero shooter that will debut simultaneously on PC and PlayStation 5.
Multi-platform rhymes with a necessarily wider audience and greater freedom of choice for users, a win-win that we hope will increasingly become the standard, no need for anachronistic gamers still ready to take up a virtual rifle and leaving for a now useless and outdated console war.
Concord itself also tells us about a Sony attracted and directed towards i live servicecurse and delight of publishers from all over the world who, one after the other, are colliding against a seemingly insurmountable wall, built by the only games as a service that really work and which, not at all by chance, have been the same for years now and years. Fortnite, Minecraft, Genshin Impact: How many similar games have we seen fail in an attempt to reach the promised land occupied almost definitively by these few names? Concord wants to invade Overwatch’s territory and, according to the very low response received from the trailer on YouTube, the road already seems uphill.
Video games, in any case, are also running in this direction and Sony, even without the firepower announced by the now ex Jim Rayan, wants to try its luck. Let’s just hope that, if Concord does not go as hoped, not only the developers will pay the consequences, but also the managers who dictate the business model to follow.
There is more in the State of Play on May 30th, something that could finally go in the direction desired by a good portion of gamers than ultra-million-dollar productions, forced to needlessly last more than fifty hours and spread over redund
ant and unjustifiably immense maps, they no longer feel any need for it. Titles like Ballad of Antara, Where Winds Meet, Infinity Nikkibut also Astro Bot itself and Monster Hunter Wilds, demonstrate how much interest is alive in productions that we could define as double A. That is, games that, in the face of smaller investments of time and money, a bit like it was for the recent Stellar Bladehowever, offer experiences with a worthy overall vision both in artistic terms and as regards the playful aspect.
If we want, this type of game, obviously with the necessary distinctions, follows the Nintendo model a bit, made up of games with less ambitious production values, as seen recently in Princess Peach: Showtime!, but this does not mean that they are not suitable for a certain and very specific type of audience. If this model were to catch on, we could enjoy a greater variety and frequency of valid and interesting productions, without waiting for the biblical times of production of triple A municipalities.
We’ll see what the rest of the season has in store for us Summer Game Fest and whether these trends highlighted by the State of Play will be further confirmed or not.
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