The Current State Of Sony And Playstation

The Japanese company Sony Interactive Entertainment, owner of the Playstation brand, has recently been going through a turbulent time in the electronic games business, with game releases that have not pleased the majority of the public, unnecessary remasters and an increase in the price of its console and subscription plan. These situations have led to a decline in consumer confidence in the brand and dissatisfaction among the vast majority of its audience.

The History of the Playstation and How Public Dissatisfaction Arose

Sony's reputation as a competent company that produced games with a strong focus on quality and history first emerged with the creation of Playstation in 1994 in Japan to cater to the growing audience for electronic games. With the launch of the Playstation 1 console in the same year, the brand gained a lot of relevance, selling around 100 million copies worldwide because it could run 3D games, something very new at the time, and made Playstation one of the biggest brands in the gaming world.

With the arrival of the new century, Playstation's fame grew more and more due to the launch of new consoles and games that presented impressive mechanics and stories to the public and, with the increase in the gamer public, Playstation ended up taking part in the period known as the “Console Wars”, which was a dispute with its Microsoft rival, Xbox. During the early 21st century, the two companies launched games and consoles that competed with each other to be the best, generating a competition that fostered the creation of groups within the gamer community that liked Playstation or Xbox better.

One of the consoles that most caught the community's attention was the Xbox 360, launched in 2005 and featuring technological innovations never seen at the time, such as high-definition games, the Xbox Live network, multiplatform games that had a better version compared to the PS3, the launch of Kinect which allowed certain games to be played using sensors and other components that made the Xbox 360 a milestone for Microsoft and the 7th generation consoles.

On the other hand, the PS4, launched in 2013, was the console that most marked the 8th generation, outselling its rival, the Xbox One, presenting innovations ranging from its format and more modern interface to exclusives that marked its generation such as The Last Of Us part 2, Infamous: Second Son, Uncharted 4, God Of War, Ghost Of Tsushima and others.

The consumer dissatisfaction that accompanies the brand today began with the launch of its new service game called Concord in August 2024, which was widely criticized for its lack of content, its high price at launch, its lack of personality and the microtransaction system that made many people dislike the new game published by Sony, being taken off the market 2 weeks after its launch, which, in addition to generating a large loss for Playstation, made its consumers begin to distrust Sony's actions.

The launch of the PS5 Pro, in September 2024, promised to be an improved version of the standard PS5, which brought many new features, such as the possibility of playing in 4K at 60 FPS, a faster GPU, improved ray tracing, upscaling technology made by artificial intelligence and backwards compatibility with PS4 games, It was launched at a very high price of US$ 699 and featured graphical and performance improvements, but nothing that would make it worth spending that amount of money, and the Pro version didn't have a disk reader, so you had to buy games on digital media from the official Playstation store.

The recent remasters of newer games, such as Until Dawn, Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone, is a practice that has generated criticism among Playstation consumers because they are projects that add small graphical improvements and come to market at the price of new games, frustrating the public who want to create new games rather than reusing console classics to make a profit from new players.

On top of all this, Sony has increased the price of PSN subscriptions in the Latin American regions and announced price increases for the PS5 in several countries, with increases of 10% in Europe, 9.3% in the UK and 9.64% or 9.48% in New Zealand and Australia.

The price increase for PS Plus and PS5 console subscriptions in several countries is a result of the current global economic climate, according to Sony.

Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster, the improved version of Until Dawn and the Days Gone remaster are examples of useless remasters because they are relatively new games and come at a full price on the market.

PS5 Pro is a console that has shown improvements, but comes with a very high price and factory limitations.

Concord turned out to be a failure for Sony, leaving a huge loss for the Playstation brand and resulting in the closure of the studio that produced it.

PS4 was the best-selling console of the 8th generation, even more than doubling the sales of Xbox One

Xbox 360 was a milestone for its time for its innovative features

PS1 with Playstation's first DualShock controller