Last month’s E3 video game expo was a strange one for PlayStation. Traditionally, video games’ biggest companies use the annual Los Angeles conference as an opportunity to bombard attendees and fans watching online with new games. For rival consoles Xbox and PlayStation, ostentatious showcase press events are especially important and competitive: once a customer chooses between the two, they are likely to play on that console for years to come.
Microsoft showed 50 games at its Xbox press conference at E3 2018, on a big stage with lots of fancy lighting. By contrast, Sony constructed several elaborate sets on an LA film lot, each themed around a different forthcoming PlayStation 4 games: The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man and Death Stranding. Fans already knew about all of these, but they were shown in more detail over 10 or 15 minutes of footage, alongside a smattering of smaller new announcements and some unexpected live music performances.
This was definitely an event designed for the social media age, for the fans, YouTubers and Instagrammers who filled the seats in place of the retail buyers and investors that once attended these unveilings. It was a strange experience for those in attendance, though, and for people watching at home: journalists had to abandon hopes of live coverage when it transpired there was no seating, and there was a lot of awkward dead air for viewers as hundreds of people were moved between sets.
“The reception I think has been mixed,” says Simon Rutter, Sony Europe’s chief operating officer. “People have really enjoyed the games themselves, and appreciated the quality of what we showed. There was also some appreciation of what we were trying to do with the construction of the event, with some criticism as to how that actually flowed, the pacing and the logistics. For the last three years, we’ve been trying to inject a bit of drama and theatrics into the proceedings, to make it more than a simple presentation. We tried to evoke the spirit of the games.”
The pressure for the big names in video games to make huge new announcements every year at E3 has become so great – and is so at odds with the way games are made, over years of hard work – that meeting fans’ expectations has become extremely difficult. (As Bethesda’s Pete Hines put it when I interviewed him during E3: “Sometimes fans don’t just want the next big thing, but they want the next big thing to know about.”)
And it’s not just E3: other events such as Gamescom in August, the PAX expos in the US and December’s Game awards are all expected to come with new announcements. PlayStation’s approach this year might have been awkward, but perhaps a change is needed.
Rutter says: “Some of the coverage this year has been a bit critical of the lack of new stuff, probably a consequence of people announcing things when they are early in production. Some of that is to do with the fear of leaks, of not being able to present the title in the way that the creator wants it to be presented. But the desire [for new announcements] is met with the reality of the production timescale: how long it actually takes you to release a game.”
At a time where ongoing games like Fortnite, Fifa and League of Legends still dominate by the sheer amount of money they generate, Rutter feels that it’s down to PlayStation to come up with something different – the creatively intensive, expensive-to-make games that become what the console is known for. And E3 is the place to show them.
“For us E3 is all about really showing people what games can do,” Rutter says. “We need to take care of the variety and the diversity in the range of games on the platform. That’s where our studios step in to create large-scale, single-player experiences – games with a strong narrative, sometimes confronting quite difficult subject matter, trying to push the storytelling element more than a live-service game might do. I’ve been with Sony for 20-odd years and I think one thing we’ve always done is respect the developer and allow them the time to come up with what they wanted.”
Allowing developers the time and money to come up with new kinds of games, says Rutter, is what will enable PlayStation to keep its position as the most popular games console – whether it’s Media Molecule’s groundbreaking Dreams or Hideo Kojima’s disquieting, environmental-disaster drama, Death Stranding.
“The way that we can grow is new audiences,” Rutter says. “As market leaders, it’s our duty to develop the market further. We’ll be the biggest beneficiary if we can do it, and if we don’t do it, then we’re the biggest losers.”
