Reflecting On My Time With PlayStation

The week-long PS blackout is over, and it really didn't do a thing. PlayStation 5s and Pros are selling out everywhere in preparation for Grand Theft Auto 6. To be quite honest, I'm actually surprised, because I though anyone who wanted GTAVI would have already bought a PlayStation by now. Apparently not.  And it makes me wonder just how many people logged in more and bought more digital games just to spite the boycott. 

Anyway, now that the boycott is over, I wanted to reflect a little on my time with PlayStation. Also, in case you're wondering, I did not participate in the blackout. I may have already mentioned earlier that I don't believe in blackout boycotts. You either boycott until the company gives what you want, or you don't. Supposedly, the blackout has been extended indefinitely for those still participating, but I can't stay offline as I play FFXIV. I could always buy the game on Xbox or Switch, but that complicates matters because of other subscriptions. We'll see. Anyway...

I was there day one for the first PlayStation which launched on September 9th 1995, just a day after my 16th birthday. In exactly one week, PlayStation as a brand - at least in North America - will turn 31. This means I've been playing PlayStation for over 30 years. I'll never forget the day I opened up my two launch games, Battle Arena Toshinden and Ridge Racer, and I saw the bottom of the discs for the first time. They were completely black! I thought I got scammed! But, as it turns out, that's just how the discs were. I thought that was really cool! It was such a fun platform and brought us amazing games such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid and of course, Final Fantasy VII. Originally, the plan was to get a Sega Saturn with my friend, but I opted for a PlayStation instead, and I'm glad I did. It was one of the best systems I ever bought. 

The morning of October 26th 2000, I was there at the Electronics Boutique in the Aurora mall to pick up my preordered PlayStation 2. I met up with a friend/co-worker of mine and the plan was to pick them up together and walk back to our cars together just in case people got wild and tried to assault us. We got there an hour early and there was already a crowd looking to score one, but they were in for a rude awakening as the store only had 32 units, and they were only for people who pre-ordered in full. I remember one guy was so angry, he threatened to sue them! Anyway, my friend and I were 3rd and 4th in line. We picked up our consoles, and made it back to our cars with no incident. I actually splurged with games, picking up Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, Ridge Racer V, Smuggler's Run, SSX, Tekken Tag Tournament and TimeSplitters. I though I picked up a seventh, but I can't remember. I do remember enjoying Smuggler's Run a ton, though. Shame Rockstar gave up on that franchise entirely. 

The previous year, I bought a Sega Dreamcast, which launched on the legendary date of 9/9/99, and I was definitely more impressed with the Dreamcast's graphics than I was with the PlayStation 2. Most of the games, outside of Tekken Tag Tournament, were plagued by jaggies (jagged lines on the edges of polygons) as the PS2 had no built in anti-aliasing. For the first year or so, I still preferred my Dreamcast, but the PS2 eventually started building up enough steam that it became my system of choice, no thanks to the early demise of the Dreamcast. Such classics as Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2 and a litany of impressive RPGs including Final Fantasy X made the successor to the PlayStation incredibly memorable. 

The PlayStation 3, however, is a different story. Even at the ridiculous launch price of 500 dollars in 2006 for a 20 gig SKU and 600 for a 60, the PlayStation 3 was still impossible to find thanks to a gross shortage of hardware. I failed to find any store near me that had them for preorder, and on launch day, no one had any spares to sell. I actually ended up biting the bullet and ordering off eBay for close to 900 dollars... And well, like the PS2 at launch, I remember being underwhelmed, and greatly disappointed in its launch line up, only picking up Ridge Racer 7 and MotorStorm a month later.  It still wasn't as impressive of a generational gap as the Dreamcast was over everything else. It took a while, but the PS3 eventually started outputting some seriously impressive graphics once the devs figured out how to get the most out of the Cell processor. We would see that in titles such as Final Fantasy XIII, Metal Gear Solid 4, and of course a game that still stands the test of time, The Last of Us. 

The PlayStation 4 is actually the most significant of the five consoles when writing about the theme of Sony's digital-only future because during its reveal, there was that very famous clip of Shuhei Yoshida and Adam Boyes mocking Xbox by explaining how PS4 games were traded. I already shared the clip in the previous blog, but I feel like sharing it again, so I will. 

This was shown during E3 of 2013, shortly after Microsoft's Don Mattrick showed off the Xbox One to the world and explained how their physical games were going to work as far as reselling and trading. This clip will always be at the forefront of my mind when I think of Sony now. When Microsoft first announced their plans for Xbox One, I was against it and boycotted and immediately set out to preorder a PS4 that day. I was lucky, and managed to snag one, and then picked it up later in the year on November 15. My launch titles were Knack, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and Killzone: Shadow Fall. Now, I know Knack was memed quite heavily, but I actually really enjoyed it. I thought it was a fun little game and I really enjoyed the effects of all the different pieces used to build Knack. ACIV remains to this day my second favorite AC behind the Ezio trilogy, and I was having a blast sailing on the high seas. In fact, I loved it so much that I'm currently playing the remake Resynced right now. But Killzone? You could tell it was rushed to make the release. It wasn't a bad looking game, but the previous two Killzones on the PS3 were already so impressive, it just failed to leave its mark, and the campaign itself was pretty unremarkable. The PS4 didn't leave as strong an impression on me as the PS3 did, but man, its twilight years were incredible with Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us Part II. In fact, I still cannot tell the different between the PS4 and PS5 versions. The PS4 version looked that good. 

So this brings me to the PlayStation 5. The summer of 2020 when the PS5 was first unveiled - and incidentally during the middle of a pandemic - the plan was that preorders were going to go live on September 17th, but something went wrong. I can't remember who started it, but a large retailer began their preorders shortly after the announcement and then the rest of them began selling theirs. Suddenly, everyone was scrambling to secure a preorder and every website kept crashing due to the heavy traffic. For me, I managed to get a PS5 in my cart at Best Buy, and then spent over six hours refreshing and putting it back in until I finally managed to get the order to go through after 1 o'clock in the following morning. I was ecstatic and couldn't fall asleep for more than an hour later.

Because of the pandemic, no one was allowed to camp out and buy them at the actual stores, which is what put extra stress on the preorders. My PS5 actually didn't even arrive the day they said it would. I think it was a few days late. My launch titles were The Adventures of Sack Boy, which was fun and cute, Demon Souls, which I still refuse to believe needed to be 70 dollars, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which I absolutely loved. Astro's Playroom was a tech demo to show off the bells and whistles of the new Dual Sense controller - which as it stands, it my current favorite controller - and it came preinstalled. I also decided to download the quirky Bugsnax game, which ended up being digital only, and is one of the games that made me rethink how I'm going to approach gaming - PlayStation in specific - in the future. 

So as of now, PlayStation 6 just isn't attractive to me. It's not just the no disc thing, but it's also that it might be insanely expensive due to the ever increasing price of RAM and quite honestly, a lack of games. Sony doesn't have anything on the horizon after Intergalactic and God of War: Lefay aside from maybe Spider-Man 3 and the next God of War. The next Horizon game is at least three or four years out thanks in part to Sony's incessant need to keep investing in GaaS (games as a service). No discs. Expensive point of entry. No games... Why are we hyped for PlayStation 6 again?

But then when I mentioned Spider-Man 3... that's when my mind begins to shift a little. I mean, it's one thing to just not bother with GTAVI. It's just more Grand Theft Auto, but there's something special about a Spider-Man game. Swinging around in the city is just so freeing, and at least to me, it offers an experience that's far more exciting than just driving around in an open world. True Crime; Watch Dogs; Saint's Row; Mafia. All different stories, but essentially just driving around open world cities. With Spider-Man, however, I feel like a superhero! I LOVE soaring over the skies and dropping in and fighting crime and all those things. That's why it'll be much harder for me to skip Spider-Man 3 than it is to skip GTA. 

And another game I started thinking about. Fumito Ueda is one of the Sony's most artistic game developers. He's given us ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. These games helped define Sony's PlayStation legacy as the place to play for truly unique games, and Ueda has a new one in the works tentatively called Project Robot. 

If this game doesn't make it by 2028... well, I guess that's it then. I could probably fight off FOMO for Spider-Man 3, but this game? Knowing what I know from this man Fumito Ueda and how each of his three games has moved me to tears? I need to play this. This is the "I NEED TO PLAY THIS GAME" moment of the next generation for me. Screw all the other AAA games. They are always the same thing, just with a different coat paint. This game will break my resolve and make me buy a PS6. Hmm... maybe I'll just buy a used PS6. That's smart, give Sony less money. 

If you've seen how adamant I've been in the past month about "NO DISC NO BUY," you'd swear I was against digital all together, but I actually am not. I just don't want digital to be the only thing. I don't want the options - choice - to be removed. I actually have bought digital-only games such as Hellblade 2, or games that came out digitally first and then physically later, such as Oddworld: Soulstorm and Scott Pilgrim. I was never opposed to digital games at all, and I believe they can and should co-exist with physical. I even own a digital-only gaming device: Playdate.

This cute little thing has a crank that folds out that can be used for gameplay such as fishing or surfing or manipulating time and it's supported by entirely free batches of software uploads along with larger, more complex games that are individually priced. Knowing how I feel about the PlayStation 6 and not wanting it because it's digital-only, I should be against this on concept alone, but I wasn't. For one, I think the difference is this machine came about from a very small company whose machine was supported by game developers that never would have had a chance of seeing their games materialize. Whereas with Sony - and especially Rockstar - they have loads of cash they can use to continue to press physical copies and still cater to the other part of their audience. Playdate is about promoting indie creativity and actually sharing free games. Sony is simply power grabbing and becoming greedier. 

I think that's the main reasoning behind me not wanting to get a PS6, not that it's digital-only, but the reason as to why. I may have been more open if I truly saw the physical format disappearing, but it hasn't, at least not in the way Sony tried to gaslight everyone by skewing their numbers. That was not appreciated at all, and it's how Sony is continuing to handle this mess that just makes it even harder to want a PS6. They're actually in court defending themselves from lawsuits saying, and I quote "reasonable gamers understand that they don't own their games." Pardon my French, but fuck off with that shit. 

Even then, as much as I want Fumito Ueda's new game, or as much as I want to play Spider-Man 3, it's this sheer disdain; this arrogance and gall; this unbridled contempt for their consumers that's going to flash in my head again when I decide to look at Amazon and check out with a PlayStation 6. Also, part of me still wants to support devs, which makes me feel bad about only buying used, but then I'm reminded that it's Sony trying to eliminate the second hand market. I want - need - Sony to start caring about this. Again, they were the ones mocking Xbox in 2013 about simply just trading a game to a friend. This was Shuhei Yoshida giving Adam Boyes a physical game. And now, Yoshida is on record saying he's moved on from physical and became digital-only. He switched up on his values. 

So honestly.. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I'd like to think that I can stand firm and simply go without a PlayStation 6, but not getting one at launch goes against my first adopter nature that I've held since the Super Nintendo. I've been buying systems at launch for 35 friggin' years! If you would have told me that I wasn't going to buy a PS6 at launch back then, or even a year ago, I would have laughed maniacally. This goes beyond disappointment; it crosses into the realm of dystopia. 

One last thing before I go. I want to address this point again, because I've had to deal with it a LOT when I was active in Twitter (and I'll reactivate just to link this and promote this blog). 

We PC gamers haven't had physical copies in over a decade so get used to it. 

True. I witnessed this happen slowly at the beginning of the 2000s. But what I also witnessed was no one saying a single thing about it. You all quietly gave up that right, but there are two major things regarding this that makes the situation different as to what's happening in the console market. 

1) Piracy was out of hand. PC games released on physical were copied and distributed illegally the very day they were installed. There was no system in place to lock down redistribution and there was no way to curtail piracy except to control the source and make their games digital only. Granted, this didn't stop piracy, but it slowed it down greatly. What's really sad about seeing physical PC games disappear was that PC games were always in really cool boxes! Remember this? Just one example.

They had shapes! Not just simple rectangles and jewel cases, but shapes!

2) There is no unified platform holder. PC isn't a platform in the same vein as a console. Multiple companies open up their own stores and sell PC games directly to their consumers. As there was no console manufacturing overload to pay dues and fees to, publishing on PC spread like wildfire and profitability spiked when they sold exclusively as digital. But again, because there were multiple store fronts such as GOG and Steam, even though PC is considered to be a platform, there is direct competition between storefronts within the platform to help control pricing. With PlayStation, there is no competition within their ecosystem. One price and one price only in their stores. Also, you can strip off the DRM of a PC title and make your own hardcopies. 

What makes this whole situation even worse is that you can ONLY buy a digital game through PSN, a service that is NOT in 121 countries. So when PC gamers go, "You're going to PC, which is digital only, because PlayStation is going digital only... make it make sense," they aren't making a point; they're just illustrating that their clueless. The PC ecosystem is an entirely different beast than PlayStation's. 

So, we'll just have to see... I'm still hoping for Sony to dial all this back, or that some compromise can be reached, or maybe I can just make peace with the entire situation and accept the fact that I'll become a hypocrite and buy a PS6 so I can keep gaming... All I can say is, thank God I never got any PlayStation tattoos.