If you were concerned about a change in Presidency at Sony Interactive Entertainment affecting how Sony makes its exclusives, it appears you can feel some peace. PlayStation has a completely different vision to the prevalent ‘Games as a Service’ model.
A news day doesn’t seem to go by without some variant of ‘Games as a Service’ being mentioned somewhere. This tends to be in a negative manner recently. Loot crates, micro-transactions et al repeatedly sour full price, big budget titles with aggressive implementation.
Sony however, have kept away from ‘Games as a Service’ rather intentionally with titles made under the PlayStation banner. By focusing on single player games such as the award-winning Horizon: Zero Dawn, Sony bucked recent trends used for elongating the lifespan of a title. These include practices creating in-game ‘seasons’ and paid for character unlocks.
PS4 sales skyrocket over Christmas
Naturally these work if a) the game is rather good, and b)it isn’t to the detriment of the in-game experience. That sort of beast is unfortunately rare. You only have to look at the furore that surrounded Middle Earth: Shadow of War and Star Wars Battlefront II. Those were two major examples of how obnoxious and ridiculous it can get.
When a Sony fan tweeted out to new SIE President John Tsuyoshi Kodera to ask Sony ‘not to go crazy with the ”Games as a Service” thing’, Kodera reassured them that this isn’t the Sony way.
I will do my best to continue the excellent work done by Mr. @AndyHousePS . About the issue of “Games as a Service”, do not worry about it. @PlayStation‘s vision is totally different.
— John (Tsuyoshi) Kodera (@TsuyoshiKodera) January 10, 2018
Kodera took over as President of SIE from Andrew House in October of last year. He is also the Chief Executive Officer.
The somewhat necessary ‘Games as a Service’ idea has been misused to epidemic proportions. So it’s refreshing to see companies that actively try to keep it out of its titles. Especially if it’s relying on the quality of the games to sell themselves.
Obviously the idea of ‘Games as a Service’ is not an inherently bad one. It’s just that like anything in the industry that makes big money once, others will follow it without understanding (wilfully or not) why it worked to begin with.