If you have a few minutes watch the first few minutes where he actually talks about why the article might feel slanted. The jist of it is that its interesting to talk about Sony potentially stumbling vs praising Sony for AAA games over and over again like a broken record.
He also clarifies the bit about indie games. It's not that Sony isnt investing in those games. He mentions how they get state of play slots and ps blog posts, he is putting them in context with Sony's first party studios and why Japan Studio found itself on the short end of the stick. He's talking specifically about games with that fancy Marvel like PS logo and Sony dont want smaller weirder shit that comes out Japan studios associated with that.
The rest of the stuff is about Jim Ryan just doing a piss poor job with the marketing and the fans. He brought up how he almost never talks about the games hes trying to sell. How he just doesnt feel like he engages with the ps userbase like the other execs did who famously went after gamers by focusing on what they wanted. TBH, I agree. I think he does a piss poor job selling these games. Selling the playstation experience. He goes missing 6 months at a time. I remember how you and I went nuts when we heard they delayed the PS5 conference during the George Floyd protests. In retrospect, its because we were starved for something. Anything. We had gone 2 full years without a sony conference. 2 years.
And now we are supposed to wait a year to see Horizon and GT7? We are supposed to be ok with just a title for GoW? For 8 months?
It's just trash. You control the narrative by engaging with the fanbase or by doing regular press or conferences. Hes doing none of those things. I keep saying this but all he has to do is show us what hes got cooking. He hides like an anti-social boy for months at a time. He doesnt let his teams talk about the game. Everything is a state secret. Would it kill them to release some info on Horizon or gow? a screenshot? look at the tlou remake blew up in his face. no one wants that shit. show us that cares about what ps gamers want. And we want more of the same. Kojima. Bloodborne. bluepoint. Days Gone. Hes just so out of touch. or rather he feels like hes out of touch which is what Jeff is trying to say.
The problem with all of this discussion is that you're discussing worthless things like "narratives" rather than actual facts about what's actually happening. Frankly, I don't give a shit about narratives. You are not entitled to be spoon fed information all the time, particularly not in a COVID type environment where it may not be easy to throw up some slick trailer every few months for every game.
"Secretive Sony" isn't a Jim Ryan phenomenon either; it started occurring under Shawn Layden. The December Playstation blowouts started going away. We started getting less frequent updates about their AAA games. He isn't hiding, he's just keeping his teams as focused as possible on making games rather than making marketing material during an extremely challenging time period.
How is this any different from what Phil Spencer has been doing? He's been even more secretive. We've got literally nothing substantial on any of their next-gen games other than some CG trailers.
The results honestly speak for themself; PS5 is extremely strong out of the gate, selling out everywhere, probably won't even be easy to find until 2022. Until there's a reason to be worried, I'm not going to be. They have Returnal this month, Ratchet in June, and then hopefully Horizon later in the year. More than you can say about ANY of their competition. Jim Ryan has had to make some difficult decisions lately, but they were not his own to make. Hermen Hulst leads the WWS group, and collectively they decided it was better to not make Gravity Daze type titles in Japan and re-focus on bolstering Team Asobi. Tough decision, but the right decision. SCEJ had so much dead weight that were not very efficient at making games or were just completely unappealing globally.
2022 is also looking pretty stellar with Forspoken, Final Fantasy 16, God of War, and GT7, precisely at the time they need to unleash heavy hitters into the market with better PS5 supply.
James Sawyer Ford
Watch the Colin podcast. He's far more harsh, but a lot of cohesive in his arguments.
Frankly this terrified me. Colin is a big Sony fanboy so he's coming from the same place. This weird nagging feeling that there are just not talking to us. The way they are killing PS3 and Vita stores, its just shocking. How they give us release dates for games, and then dont follow up on them. Forget horizon making 2021, not even the most hardcore sony fans believe the fact that GoW will be coming out this year like sony said just 8 months ago. They are failing to excite gamers. They have just sat on their ass for months. I was super hyped after the PS5 launch, and now I feel nothing. I dont want to turn on my playstation. There is nothing to look forward to and just bad news after another. Studio shutdowns, store shutdowns, exclusives going free on other platforms, rumors after rumors of devs ending decades long relationships with them.
It's getting exhausting and this guy is just sitting there doing nothing. Not a single word. He wont even release sales figures of games and consoles. Like FFS give us something. How can a guy from marketing be this bad at creating excitement. It's literally the only thing he's good at, its literally the reason why he got hired as CEO. It sure as hell wasnt his game development skills. Why even hire him if narrative isnt important, if marketing isnt important, if generating excitement isnt important? If the console will sell anyway why hire a marketing CEO?
You give Jim Ryan far to much credit for what he can honestly "do" in his role, especially in such a short period of time. These big AAAA projects were being worked on well before he became president. He's a marketing guy and a figurehead. The people on the ground floor at these massive studios are the ones putting in the work that will determine whether their projects succeed or fail, but luckily he believes that they should take the time to make them right instead of rushing them out like CP2077.
Sure, he can make restructuring changes like SCEJ, but that was honestly a positive in my book. Bend Studio is working on their most ambitious project yet and a new IP, that's exciting to me. He signed Haven to a deal, that's potentially exciting. The jury is still out on Bluepoint and Kojima, but given their heritage together I find it highly unlikely that they would sign exclusively anywhere else. Multiplat? Sure, but that's no big deal in the grand scheme of things.