E3 2017: Sony

When talking about Ubisoft, I mentioned that their conference provided the uplifting message that any publisher can turn their press briefings from sleep-inducing to invigorating overnight. Sony reminded us that if that's the case, then the opposite must also be true. I kept looking back over the show, wondering what I'd missed. There had to be more announcements and details that slipped my attention. Maybe I just zoned out, or maybe they were in that gap where Giant Bomb's internet got fuzzy, but no, Sony had a phobia both for revealing anything new and providing informative details on anything that we knew about already. Most of the debuts were in the form of new PlayStation VR games, of which there were five, but those games are exclusive to a $399/£349 peripheral, and if they're following in the footsteps of the PSVR games before them then they're going to be closer to prototypes than full-length experiences. Outside of the PSVR library, Sony announced a meagre two new games during their conference: Monster Hunter World and Marvel's Spider-Man.

Monster Hunter World played perfectly well, but Spider-Man was not the heavy-hitting closer Sony thought it was. The web-slinging looks like it gives the sense of freeing traversal that we've always wanted from a Spider-Man game but the combat and some of the platforming are lifted right out of Arkham Asylum, a game that came out in 2009 and has already had its style of action thoroughly played out. Heck, one of the games that copied Arkham Asylum's combat system back in the day was another Spider-Man game. Spider-Man was also a game reliant on a disconcerting number of quick-time events.

For the other games during the briefing, Sony didn't have their sales face on. Between Days Gone, God of War, and Detroit: Being Human, the Playstation 4 is fast becoming the home of mediocre dramas. Detroit could be exploring a vital question of whether or not violence is an effective or justifiable method for liberating the oppressed, but it's more likely to boil down to a series of Paragon/Renegade switches, and the writing is distinctly David Cage. E.g. There's a moment where an android woman looks through a window at other androids on display in a shop, and the implication of the scene is obvious, but then the writers have her say "That's what we are to them, just merchandise on display in a shop window". The Call of Duty: World War 2 trailer might have been the low point of the conference. CoD WW2 is an idea that's hard to pitch to anyone who's been playing shooters since the 90s. It's the two most exhausted concepts in video games slammed together, and so a compelling case needs to be made for it. It needs to be seen doing something with setting or mechanics that we've never seen before, but the trailer they showed suggested they're playing it as literally and unimaginatively as possible.

Sony might have been able to argue better for these games, but they didn't make a habit out of showing demos or letting developers speak. I'm not trying to say that other publishers didn't have gaping holes in their conferences or that Sony was anywhere near perfect in previous years, but we know console manufacturers can do better than this. Sony's 2016 conference had the Death Stranding trailer and the Horizon: Zero Dawn demo and even had better previews of God of War and Detroit. Microsoft relied heavily on trailers this year but had a more densely packed conference with forty-two games and showed greater dedication to indies, featuring thirty-two games from their ID@Xbox programme. Sony used to be the king of indie representation at E3, and now they barely seem to care.

The natural question becomes "Where did all of Sony's games go?". We could conclude that they ran out of time but Microsoft are a good example of how you can show a lot, even in a limited space, and Sony could have easily stretched from sixty minutes to ninety if their belt was too tight. We could speculate that Sony is holding back on us because there's a Playstation 5 ready to be announced but we've only had four years of the Playstation 4, and this isn't how you treat a console launch. Typically, companies make sure that the titles that people care about come out on the machines that already have an established player base and launch windows for new consoles are left underwhelming as publishers wait for the new platform to pick up speed.

In reality, some of the problem was a misallocation of announcements. Sony had trailers and news for multiple exciting games during the pre-show for the conference that were not rivalled by anything in the conference itself. There was SuperHot for PSVR, Undertale on PS4 and Vita, and Tropico 6. There was also Hidden Agenda, which was essentially a local multiplayer version of Until Dawn. Then there was That's You! which didn't look good, but it was at least fun to watch, and we had some engrossing monologuing from Mark Cerny. Sony presumably pushed these elements to one side because they weren't AAA enough for the main conference but this seems like an old-fashioned way to treat more niche content, and they didn't believe in doing it before. Even if there was some way to shun smaller devs correctly, Sony didn't have the AAA line-up to support that structure. Another likely factor towards Sony's tight-lipped nature was that in a world of ever-increasing digital connectivity, there's a logic to drip-feeding your fans information throughout the year instead of trying to talk over the noise of E3 and rely on the press to report on your conference. It's probably why so many of the games Sony had were games that were announced prior to the briefing.

So a combination of just going for the blockbuster games without many blockbuster announcements to make and the decreasing necessity of E3 as an advertising platform likely diluted the Sony conference. Still, there's no excuse for a show this poor. In an age when even companies like Ubisoft and EA are getting wise to how you put on a conference that grabs peoples' attention, this series of drab video advertisements isn't going to cut it because if all you have is trailers you don't have a press conference, you have a YouTube playlist. Thanks for reading.