30 Years of PlayStation

[Finsbury Girl]

Absolutely horrendous looking console. edit,. Yeah the build quality was atrocious. Cheap and nasty.

[Neon Ignition]

The only way the PS3 Super Slim looks slightly acceptable is if you put a pulsating red LED like KITTS on the front edge to make it look like the cars nose

[wakka]

I quite like the super slim!

Build quality was cheap but I like the overall look, like a slimmer, curvier version of the original PS2. It was really dinky, too.

[QualityChimp]

I think you need to keep that cone of shame on a bit longer, wakka!

[Neon Ignition]

--2013 --
By this year Sony had rebuilt momentum and good will to see X360 sales tail off and PS3 improve enough to stave off last place for their system by a very narrow margin. The PS Vita had clearly derailed with Sony's own support software support drying up but a new generation battle was priming up between the upcoming Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. Sony would find itself gifted the greatest gift of all, a competitor putting a shotgun through its marketing mouth and pulling the trigger as Microsofts console unveiling went spectacularly badly. Giving them the front step, Sony moved aggressively with their new system and with good will for the PS3 firmly in gamers minds thanks to the universal praise of The Last of Us, the home console came firmly into focus with the handheld side getting the oddity PSTV launched.




As the PlayStation 4 era began, where did you stand with the platform at this point?

[QualityChimp]

I think this moment is pretty much the beginning of the end for Xbox.
That disastrous E3 reveal, where they thought everyone would be overjoyed with all the One announcements, but everyone saw them differently, mainly that it was barely about the games and pretty anti-consumer, let's be honest.

As for the PS4, I came along a few years later and straight onto a Pro.
I remember feeling unimpressed that there were so few PS4-only games and most big games I could play on my 360.
I do remember reaching a point where I was falling behind, though. I could've happily played my 360 backlog for another decade if I rejected the FOMO, but I got my PS4 as a birthday present and was over the moon with it.

I was expecting something similar this console gen, but we're almost 3 and half years since PS5 launched and on the Wiki page it lists 13 exclusive games, some of which aren't out yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_games

So yeah, PS4 is ace, took a while to get going and still has plenty of legs, IMHO.

[Neon Ignition]

2013 felt like a year of pure win for Sony even though looking back it wasn't a stacked one. I remember how nuts it felt having PS4, XBO and Mario 3D World launch at the same time - cost me a fortune

[hudson]

A 21 second knockout.

[QualityChimp]

A 21 second knockout.

Such a great video. They didn't even mention Xbox, but everyone knew what they were alluding to.
Microsoft were probably pretty pleased with themselves, then the day after Sony just did the opposite of them and everyone went nuts.

The One launch is worse than I remembered, banging on about scans of a real service dog in CoD:

->Open Spoiler<-

Listen to the crowd's response when Sony talk about how they won't do what Microsoft said:

->Open Spoiler<-

[wakka]

The Xbox One reveal was such a disappointment. Sony's clapback had serious E3 1994 '299' energy, and it was just as portentous for the fate of both systems.

The Bone, for me, is a classic example of losing sight of the customer. Microsoft wanted an all-in-one home entertainment box dominating living rooms, therefore that is what they designed and sold. That consumers might have no interest in this idea was obviously not seriously considered.

The PS4 was the reverse. After the bloated, overpriced and over-egged PS3, Sony went back to basics with a performant, games-focused machine at a good price.

Microsoft could have fought back effectively. But the first party line-up Sony delivered - and Microsoft's complete failure to compete effectively with it - would go on to deliver a fatality.

[Neon Ignition]

The whole gen felt like a slam dunk from that first reveal, it never felt like MS worked to recover their fortunes the same way Sony did with the PS3 but I guess that's the difference between the two companies where for Sony PS has become their lifeblood but for MS Xbox has always been more like a semi-reluctant side hobby. It didn't matter that the PS4 launched with nothing great, not that that isn't the normal for PS launches.

[Neon Ignition]

-- 2014 --
Perhaps a foreshadowing of the future of PlayStation, the PS4 ploughed on through its first year and into its second to great success and with the two most successful and well thought of releases being remasters of GTAV and The Last of Us. Sony announced that they would be launching PS Now, their streaming service, and that they would be looking into VR.




When the debacle of 2013 had passed and the normalcy of living with PS4 - and XBO - had settled in, what did you think of the console?

[Lebowski]

Semi reluctant side hobby??? Microsoft messed up that gen as it pushed too hard to diversify the Xbox into a multimedia system, adopted a load of anti consumer practices, struggled with bad exclusive games, and hobbled its system's power and RRP with a mandatory camera that nobody wanted. they thought they were on top and in a position to push a load of anti consumer practices and failed. They squandered the Xbox 360s brand and goodwill by chasing a casual Kinect market thinking they had the next Wii on their hands, when in fact they had a decent selling accessory that didn't need all their studios tilting to make games for it.

I remember setting up the Xbox with my TV, and it drove my wife mad as if you didn't use voice control you had to find a controller to turn the Xbox on then use a separate remote to use the cable box, saying hey xbox watch BBC was the only benefit, and it just didn't work well enough and led to you repeating yourself, or the command just failing to select the right channel. its DRM policies were dropped before launch, The mandatory Camera was dropped after about 6 months and became an expensive paperweight with no software and no point to it being plugged in which was a small mercy as mine stopped working after it took one to many falls off the TV cabinet.

-----------

My PS4 pre-order was messed up by Game and made the launch super stressful, they had some sort of mass payment fail with one of their providers and had to ring people individually and do card payments over the phone. Killzone looked great but was a bit of a dog to play, Black Flag was amazing at the time and It's hard to see how Ubisoft could have had a pirate game in development for 11 years, and it doesn't stand up too a PS4 launch window title.

[Neon Ignition]

I think it's emerged about three times now over the 20+ years about instances where MS has considered axing Xbox, someone always seems to convince them to stick it out but it's only really now that revenues are good that they seem invested and even then that explains why they're pivoting away from consoles as that aspect has always been a dead end for them. It's probably a good reason as to why the approaches differ so much even though the consoles have long been nearly identical. With PS4 I think the early frustration was that the system was decent but it didn't take long to realise that the perks of the PS3 era where vanishing. It launched without the same functionality, online gaming being paywalled became inevitable etc. Very much like PS3, but a less compelling version in those early days.

[wakka]

The whole gen felt like a slam dunk from that first reveal, it never felt like MS worked to recover their fortunes the same way Sony did with the PS3 but I guess that's the difference between the two companies where for Sony PS has become their lifeblood but for MS Xbox has always been more like a semi-reluctant side hobby. It didn't matter that the PS4 launched with nothing great, not that that isn't the normal for PS launches.

Yeah, the PS4 launch's whole pitch was that it was the anti-Xbox, so the launch games didn't really matter - especially since Xbox didn't bring anything compelling to the table in that regard either.

I would actually argue that Microsoft did work extremely hard to recover their fortunes though, at least on the platform and hardware side of things. The speed with which they rolled back the (many) bad decisions they made with the launch machine is to their credit, and they effectively redesigned and relaunched the platform with S and X models. They also created Game Pass, which was an innovative expansion of PS+ Instant Game Collection which provided a lot of value to subscribers. They went from the most anti-consumer at the start of the gen to the most pro-consumer by the end.

I think they made all the right moves on that side of things, but the insurmountable problem is that their exclusive software was mostly mediocre and definitely not 'system seller' tier.

Microsoft made a lot of unimaginative sequels to 360 games, while Sony created games that felt meaningfully next gen - in philosophy and storytelling, as well as technical proficiency - and captured players' imaginations. I think in particular the emphasis on dad 'em ups turned out to be a masterstroke. God of War, Uncharted 4, Spider-Man and Horizon: Zero Dawn really did really well to engage a very broad range of ages.

They squandered the Xbox 360s brand and goodwill by chasing a casual Kinect market thinking they had the next Wii on their hands, when in fact they had a decent selling accessory that didn't need all their studios tilting to make games for it.

Yeah. It was exactly the same mistake Nintendo made with the WiiU. Both platform holders thought the motion controls gravy train would keep on rolling, but it was over and no one, especially core videogame buyers, wanted that stuff any more.