The first words out of Sony Entertainment’s CEO Andrew House said it all: “The stakes are high.”
His words to the Hammerstein Ballroom last night – packed with journalists, stacked with deep-bass speakers and lit by a dense lattice of lasers – were, if anything, an understatement. Once-mighty Sony is struggling. The franchise most vital to its revival is PlayStation.
The history of the device is worth revisiting. PlayStation was launched in 1994, a fringe product created by renegade engineer Ken Kutaragi. His vision, he once told me, “was to create a new concept for computer entertainment — we wanted to include as much of the audience as possible, including females and seniors, East and West, North and South…. In our minds it was not a game machine, but a preparation for future entertainment.”
PlayStation 1 became a surprise hit, eventually selling 100 million, but the real game changer was PlayStation 2, released in 2006. That second iteration pushed the technology envelope with better graphics and faster chips than you’d find in a PC. It was also the first game machine with optical DVD storage. But Kutaragi’s larger vision was remaking and broadening entertainment. “Content itself is culture,” he said as he prepared to launch. That was part of the reason that he felt it imperative for new iterations of PlayStation to run previous software. “A new version PlayStation should create new forms of entertainment,” he said, but “we don’t want to throw away our history, it’s very, very clear that keeping compatibility is important.”
Powered by what Kutaragi called “the emotion engine,” PlayStation 2 became the best-selling videogame machine of all time, but Kutargi saw it as symbolic of a new era of broadband entertainment, something that would allow users to “jack into the Matrix world.”
By the time PlayStation 3 was released in 2006, Sony had helped make gaming a core activity for an entire generation. The new machine was also an ambitious technology reach, incorporating a then-exotic Blu-ray drive and an unusual architecture. Kutaragi’s idea was that PlayStation 3 would become a powerful media hub as well as a broad platform for consumer electronics. (By the time of PS3’s release, Kutaragi had lost a corporate political struggle and soon would retire from an active role in Sony.) But Sony’s competitors also had successful platforms, and though PlayStation 3 was successful, it did not sell as well as its predecessors.
Now, seven years after PlayStation 3, Sony was promising to finally reveal its new machine, slated for release at the end of the year. Speculation was all over the map about its abilities.
The point of the evening was to provide some answers — but not all. Sony said nothing about details like pricing and a specific release date. Most strikingly, the device itself never made an appearance. Not even a photo. But Sony did outline its vision, and filled in the gaps with a series of game demos from various developers.
As you’d expect, the PS4 is more powerful than its predecessor. But Sony is no longer interested in creating a unique proprietary computing platform. As lead architect Mark Cerny explained, the new model reverts to a traditional PC architecture albeit a “supercharged” one, with a heavy-duty processor and an enhanced graphics chip. Faced with a standard platform, developers can presumably produce games more quickly.
Sony executives talked about an enhanced game network that could stream content, and even begin playing a game before the download is completed. They said that games could easily be moved to the hand-held PlayStation Vita, or even other devices like smartphones or tablets. The new game controller they revealed is basically the same, but includes a few new features like a “share” button, and a colored light that can make it easier to identify multiple players. Another welcome change is that games will start more quickly, lending the devices the instant-on feel of tablet computing.
But most of the evening was taken with lengthy previews of the games developers were concocting for PlayStation 4. By and large, they appeared to be better-looking, smoother-playing and bloodier versions of games familiar in the console canon.
Remember, the hardware in these consoles is basically frozen until the next iteration. So in effect, Sony is making a bet that the themes and gameplay its customers like now are similar to what they’re going to eat up six or seven years hence. The PS4 is designed to improve those games, but not to reinvent gaming itself.
But look what’s happened in the seven years since Sony launched the PS3 — social gaming, casual smartphone gaming, and gesture-based interfaces like Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect have generated new kinds of products and broadened the audience for gaming itself. The PS4 will make it easier to integrate social activities into its games — it’s now really simple to invite friends to play, to “spectate” other people’s games, or even ask a remote friend to take over the controls to get you to the next level. But for all that, Sony showed no signs of integrating social into its games in the way Zynga and other companies have. As for gesture-based control, Sony offers a hand-held camera peripheral, but has seemingly refrained from building a camera into the device itself.
I say “seemingly” because the device itself never made an appearance at the launch event. After the event, I asked Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Jack Tretton about that omission. “We didn’t think it was significant to show the box. he says. “When I think of a game system, I think about the games.”
Tretton also confirmed something not specified in the presentation: the PS4 is not backward compatible with previous games. (So much for Kutaragi’s contention that previous game content is vital history.) That means that new buyers lose their steep emotional and financial investment in software. Sony’s presumed solution is that at some point in the future, its game network might be able to stream those legacy games to run on the PS4 platform. But for the foreseeable future, adopting the PS4 means abandoning one’s current game library.
Tretton is frank when speaking about who will buy the PS4. (Of course, he predicts huge sales.) The gaming world is broad, he says, and ideally Sony will lure people who play on smartphones to consider a console. But he has a certain customer in mind. “We’re focusing on that core gamer, the gamer who wants the ultimate experience and lives for gaming. If you’re not a gamer, I don’t think you get it.”
In short, Sony is circling its wagons around the core gamer, hoping that the console gaming phenomenon is in effect preserved in amber, impervious to the next waves of technology and connectivity.
To be sure, the new games that will run on PlayStation 4 look amazing. The most interesting game previewed was something called Watchdog. It takes place in a dystopic version of Chicago where personal information about all citizens and locations can instantly be “hacked” by a flick of a controller button. Using that information, your character can make his way through the urban maze for good or ill.
But here’s the thing about that scary fictional world of Watchdog: It’s not too much different that the augmented reality that location-based smartphones are already creating. Instead of Sony’s ho-hum advances of making it easier to share games — or to “spectate” on someone’s else’s first-person shooter session, wouldn’t it have been more exciting to somehow create a new kind of game that drew upon the vast trove of locational and personal information we carry around with us?
Instead, Sony is betting that for the next seven years no new paradigms will lure the bulk of gamers away from their basements. That may be a decent bet. Year after year, the gamer population spends endless hours at their controls and spends endless loot on new games. (Though in recent years, sales aren’t as strong, maybe because the low price of mobile games are having an effect.) But in an area where platforms are fast evolving (think Google Glass and other wearables), is it really far-fetched to think that time is running out on traditional console gaming?
Improbable? Maybe. But it’s also improbable to attend a game console launch where the console never shows up.
Sony Circles the Wagons With PlayStation 4
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Sony Circles the Wagons With PlayStation 4
