Nintendo, PlayStation Celebrate Xbox Series Launch With Microsoft

See stuff as wholesome as this is why console wars was and always will be stupid

Daily reminder that Cory Barlog (God of War Director) owns like 2 Nintendo Switches and an Xbox One

@Kefka2589 I myself am getting my Xbox stuff on PC but either way I'm investing in all three platforms at various points during the coming console generation. Really hope Series X/S are able to pull MS out of the blood soaked waters of the last generation, but the consoles so far have no hook for me personally. It needs its Demon's Souls moment.

Could it be that the industry is growing up? Welcome first signs right there. Well-played N and Sony!

@gollumb82 The industry's already pretty grown up. Hell Reggie, Shawn Layden and Phil Spencer all appeared on stage to give the opening monologue for the Game Awards in 2018. The vocal minority is just really vocal

The big 3 getting along is nice..

@TheFrenchiestFry
That's great to hear. It probably also depends which gaming sites one frequents. PureXbox/PushSquare have been my go-to sites for some time because the articles and comments are mostly mature. Mostly 😉

makes you wonder why people still cling on to the whole "war" side of gaming doesn't it

Now if only the Fanboys could get along nicely.....

This just reminded me.....

I miss Reggie running Nintendo. 😁

@gollumb82 Sadly I think the situation has changed for the better for only Nintendo over the years. I remember back in 2013 when PS4 and Xbox One launched and there were more exchanges between PlayStation and Xbox, specifically between key figures from each brand. Now all those key figures from PlayStation are gone, and from the looks of it, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan doesn't even have a Twitter account.

I dug up this article from 2013 as a reference: https://www.destructoid.com/microsoft-congratulates-sony-on-ps4-launch-265745.phtml

I seriously miss people like Shuhei Yoshida and Adam Boyes. There's barely any social media engagement from Sony these days compared to back in 2013-2015.

I've seen a lot of nonsense on Facebook and Twitter recently but we're all just gamers regardless of choice of platform and this is an exciting time to be a gamer

@LtSarge
I agree. Even folks over at Push Square have voiced their concern over Sony's silence in the media for a while now. Ever since Sony started skipping E3 it seems like they see themselves in a league of their own and don't feel the need for a more significant media presence. I see more influencers and youtubers doing Sony's job lately instead of the execs themselves.

@gollumb82 Yeah I remember that Sammy on Push Square made a Soapbox article some time ago where he points this out, but sadly I can't find that article now.

But yeah, I genuinely miss the days where we had so many personalities directly from PlayStation who would interact with fans on social medias. There was even one key figure who's sole job was to bring more games to PS Vita and he would literally ask people on Twitter which games they wanted to see on Vita, lol.

Rampant consumerism! The great uniter! Eat your heart out, Marx & Lenin!

@gollumb82 @LtSarge Yeah, that change in leadership has really broken a lot of what made the PS organization fun and engaging. It's all from the rumor mill, but depending on how much of the rumor mill you believe, basically Jimmy is a control-freak with his own vision, who delegates nothing to anyone else, which is why you see his monotone, lifeless self in all the presentations instead of someone else more engaging, and all those other great leaders either ran for the doors as fast as they could to be rid of it, or were reassigned to hole in the wall reduced roles to keep them from interfering. Shu Yoshida is still there but greatly diminished (but Jim has no power over the Japanese staff, so he couldn't force him out entirely.) Layden heading for the exit is the big tip-off that something is really rotten at HQ. Shaun Layden spent his whole life at Sony and was once the right hand of the old golden-age CEO, and despite being a Westerner was essentially part of the Japanese staff. For him to seek an exit.....things had to be really...really bad internally. The rumors speak of power struggles between him and Jim and the plans for globalizing SIE. I'm not sure what went on with Hirai for him to have made a sudden and abrupt "retirement" exit, as well, but leaving the whole company in the hands of a CFO has to be a last resort for a quality CEO like he was. It was months after he announced he'd split his time between Tokyo and Hollywood to personally fix the rot at Columbia-Tristar/Sony Pictures that he suddenly "retired." Sony may be financially strong now, but the inside of the organization shows signs of considerable rot from the outside....the management seems very broken.

The departure from E3 marked that turning point, and it was right after the disastrous prior E3 that made Layden look somewhat buffoonish. They've been "trying to go Nintendo" ever since, where they do their own thing in their own space, even cancelling their own showcase events, saving every penny and letting momentum carry them. Financially it's working out well for them. But that's the kind of goodwill that takes a lot of effort to build and is easy to lose before you even realize it's being lost. The PS4 launch era leaders had vision and a feel for the industry. The current management is a bunch of bean counters that manages financial and product rollout strategies from a spreadsheet. They've made a lot of missteps that aren't going to hurt them in the short term, but the feeling I have is over the next 7 years those kinds of decisions are going to erode their favorability little by little, year over year.

Got to admit I'm surprised Sony joined on into the congratulation bandwagon, but nice to see, since MS always goes out of their way to congratulate Sony milestones (under Phil anyways.)

The world is a pretty weird place at the minute, so to see a bit of congratulation within the industry is a funny way of uniting us gamers. Each to his own, I'll get a ps5 but that doesn't mean I like Sony lol

Jim Ryan is an absolute buffoon & a tool, in the vein of Don Mattrick.

But, in saying that, I also love competition as it benefits gamers. Like I said in another article.....

Xbox gamers should love that Sony is around. And PlayStation gamers should love that Xbox is around. If not, all gamers would be screwed.

@NEStalgia 100% agree with you, very well-written post. This is sadly one of the reasons why I can't in good faith support PlayStation with PS5 because I get the feeling that they're just gonna mess it up one way or another. People are so excited to play Horizon 2 and God of War 2, and those games are gonna sell really well. When Jim Ryan sees that, he's going to be thinking: "Well if these games are making us so much money, why not just keep making more and more of the same?". And this is where I believe Sony's first-party studios will stop being innovative and just keep releasing the same type of game over and over because there's no reason to deviate from this path if it's so successful due to Ryan's influence.

@KelticDevil Agreed on all counts!

@LtSarge Absolutely. Attrition in this type of business is a tricky thing. You can be losing traction while your numbers actually show increases. The blowback is usually delayed and hits in a deferred manner. By the time blowback starts to become visible and numbers start showing real decline, you're far past the damage point and you're taking in water faster than you can bail.

The first year or so of PS5 is likely to send all the wrong signals. They'll see positive numbers, they'll see their strategies are working in their favor, and they'll double down on them, all while not realizing an undertow moving away from them in key areas which won't be realized until it's too late, on the other half of the gen. I've said in a few articles on PushSquare, I'm not worried about the financial or numbers success of PS5, nor the content available for it. PS5 is already in and done. Every misstep now that started last month is going to hit during the PS6 launch, or late in the PS5 era. At that point it's too late to right the ship in a reasonable time and you end up with an XBox One/WiiU situation.

Why that should matter to XBox gamers as much as PS gamers is because if PS6 ends up being a launch disaster, or even late-PS5 becomes problematic, and the market tilts too heavily to favor MS, the tables likely reverse, and MS becomes too powerful and too self-destructive again as well.

Honestly the best thing that could have happened is for massive blowback and PS5 to become a trainwreck, financially, early on, to a degree that requires a massive shakeup of PS management before a slow leak becomes a flood. That would have, in the longer term, stabilized the market competition, and the player experience, across the board. The sooner they see a negative result from the current policies and mindsets, the sooner they would be able to straighten their course before digging deeper.

What you say about rehashes is very very true to Ryan's thinking. Which is in line with the other big AAA studio thinking (Ubi, EA, 2K, etc.) His comments on Tsushima were troubling. Not that GoT isn't phenominal or worthy of a sequel, but it says plainly exactly what you suggest. If we see a franchise is big, then that's a blockbuster to keep pushing. Big franchises = big money. People praise Sony first party content, but content they're praising is stuff that was started by the old management. Layden & Yoshida. They've cleared the pipeline of that now, and now we're getting to the start of Jim's vision. Which looks a lot like Ubisoft's vision. But without the passion that Yves demonstrates.

@NEStalgia Man I'm really impressed by how forward thinking you are and being able to see patterns that far ahead into the future because I definitely agree with all those things since it makes sense. Sony becoming too confident, they start losing their edge, Microsoft becomes too confident because of this and they start losing their edge as well, and so the cycle continues. Although maybe it will be different now since Microsoft is taking a different approach with Game Pass. Maybe that will lead to them leaving the console market entirely in the future, who knows!

Anyway once again, very well-written post and we definitely need more people like you here who are able to think in long-term. Too many people these days are way too myopic.

@LtSarge

Exactly!

I love it. Competition is overrated. We're all humans.

@LtSarge under Phil Xbox will never leave consoles. Phil is a gamer and he's there for gamers. He's also a very very good businessman, but he's a very wholesome gamer first!

I like when companies snipe back and forth but at the end of the day, it's just about great gaming experiences. This is an exciting week for the industry and with all the challenges brought this year to get to this point, it's good to see everybody celebrating.

Kinda funny seeing Sony congratulating Ms on Series X and at the same time paying to keep games like FF 16 off the Xbox console for at least a year, among many others, but business is business

@Kefka2589 Very interesting comparison, thanks for tagging me! And yeah, I just don't see all the hype for games that are more of the same. Spider-Man is more Spider-Man, and when Spider-Man 2 comes out it's going to be the same case with that game as well. Not to mention all the other sequels that Sony's studios have planned.

The thing is that it's hard to innovate these days when there's no major technological advancements in hardware. All that PS5 has going for is faster load times, 3D Audio and haptic feedback. That's not really innovative in my eyes and stuff like haptic feedback just sounds like a gimmick. I saw a person who was playing on PS5 yesterday tweet out that he's considering turning off haptics altogether because it was distracting and annoying him, and I can definitely see that.

At the end of the day, what's most important is the games and Sony just keeps pumping out the same open world action games all the time. It is true though that Microsoft doesn't have any new first-party titles for Series X right now, but having Game Pass on the Xbox platform just makes owning an Xbox worth it. Not only in terms of cost savings, but also in terms of having access to so many games with lots of variety. I mean, there are now 350 games on console Game Pass Ultimate with the addition of EA Play and that's just insane value, on top of first-party games being released day one on the service. Sony just can't compete in that regard at all.