‘The 30th anniversary of PlayStation is the worst year ever for Sony'

A Reader’s Feature worries that the 30th anniversary of PlayStation is coming at the lowest point ever for Sony’s video games business.

It will soon be 28 years since I played my first PlayStation console. Its 30th anniversary is this December, but it didn’t come out in the UK until the next year and I didn’t get it for my Christmas until the year after that. Still, it’s obviously a big anniversary for Sony and time for them to take stock of where they are right now and everything that has got them to this point. Which is actually a deeply depressing thought.

By the end of the PlayStation 4 era, Sony was at the absolute top of their game. Even with the Switch doing well they’d dominated the generation like no time since the PlayStation 2 and had their absolute best line-up of exclusive games.

And then, well… you don’t need me to go over everything Sony has, or rather hasn’t, done over the last couple of years. The thing that gets me is that it all seems for no reason, like a championship runner that feels they’re so far ahead of the pack they can just afford to wander off and stroll around for a bit rather than get the best time possible.

I would mention the tortoise and the hare, but I don’t feel Xbox are even in this race. I suspect Sony don’t either, which is maybe why they’ve got so complacent and arrogant. You’d think there’d be someone in charge trying to make sure that doesn’t happen, but for these last two years it’s not really seemed as if there is anyone calling the shots – certainly not anyone that ever talks to the public.

I just can’t think of any time in PlayStation’s 30 year history where they’ve been in a worse position. The first few years of the PlayStation 3 is the only other contender but at least then there was hope. Sony admitted their faults and they made clear their plans to turn things around (and they did, it still outsold the Xbox 360 in the end).

But this time? Sony hasn’t said anything about anything. They haven’t explained what they’re trying to do or if their plans have changed or if they even think anything has gone wrong recently. They say and do nothing, like the captain of the Titanic, and I’m afraid the ship is very quickly sinking on its anniversary year.

To be fair they don’t seem to have done much to promote the 30th, just those grey consoles and some pointless nick-nacks, and I imagine that’s because Sony is actively embarrassed at the state it’s in at the moment. And if it isn’t it absolutely should be.

I see we’ve got rumours of another State of Play coming up this week, so once again all the fans are hoping and dreaming that this will be the big one. This will be the one where they turn things around and start acting like they did in the PlayStation 4 era again, or even just like they did for the first few years of the PlayStation 5.

But how many times have we hoped that this year? Three, four times? And it never happens. Not only does it never happen but Sony never gives any indication that they think anything is wrong or that they’re going to do anything about it. What a miserable birthday.

By reader Focus