IS Sony breaking their promise and does that matter?

"We believe in Generations"

Sony is not your friend. I feel that's a fact that a good many people are very well aware of, almost painfully so after the recent PS5 debacle. (A real friend would have sorted out component supply issues before shoving something onto the market that would obviously be swallowed up by scalpers unless consistent stock numbers were maintained!) But that's a rule/ lesson which can be expanded towards all companies and explain all decisions and choices made by large industry-leader types just like Sony, because it's a very simple formula once you wrap your head around it. Basically, choices and directions that big companies take aren't decided and made with your best interests to mind- only their own. Should your interests and there's line up, usually in a very periphery manner, then there may be a little intersection, but most of the time the consumer represents the hurdle that the company has to scale. That's something I feel like people need to remember when it comes to talking about Sony and the recent backtracking they've done on how they see the burgeoning console generations.

So the new generation of games is upon us, and that doesn't just refer to Consoles slightly catching up to the capabilities of high-end PCs. Unreal recently revealed Unreal Engine 5 with it's ludicrous number of improvements and quality of life adjustments that's sure to help expand the larger scope of game design alongside all the new hardware. (As Unreal Engine is probably one of the most popular and easily the most used video game engine of all time) But what the new generation actually translates to was supposed to mean something decidedly different depending on who was talking. For PC players it's barely a noticeable shift, but for console players there is supposed to be a significant step up. Microsoft sort of tempered expectations there by revealing how their approach would be to support cross-generation games for two years as the new console slowly became more affordable. Sony on the otherhand infamously said "We believe in generations" and thus wanted a clear cutting off point. But what do these opposing philosophies actually mean?

"ell in terms of the games that would be made  under these stipulations (which is really all that matters in this industry), Xbox would have to limit the scope of their next first party games for the following two years because any game which could be made would have to be able to run on the weakest last gen console. Third party developers would similarly be held back, which means that the paradigm of game design can't take that great leap forward which a console generation increment is supposed to represent. Sony, however, very much want to start taking advantage of all the new hardware as soon as possible, and thus just cut out the PS4 as soon as possible with their statement and created exclusives of unmatched fidelity and functionality like Demon Souls and... well, actually just Demon Souls right now. The new Ratchet and Clank is promising to make great use of the new Solid State Drive to do some instant loading of new worlds in real time, something patently impossible on older generations, but apart from that all the other games that weren't originally announced to have last gen ports are slowly being lined up with one, and fans are starting to see it as a betrayal.

It's not as though these games aren't being improved in the next generation's hardware, of course they are. 'Horizon: Forbidden West's developers mentioned how there's this whole cinematic rendering quality to the game that is exclusive to cutscenes in the PS4 version but is on by default for the PS5 version. Spiderman Miles Morales has certain 'dens' which have actually no loading screens to enter or leave on PS5 and I'm sure Kratos' new beard in God of War Ragnarok is going to feature extra follicles in the newer gen version. But these are all surface level improvements, held back by the fact that the very design of these games are informed by last generation limitation, whereas they could completely reinvent the design process if those older systems were left behind. Take loading, for instance. Ratchet and Clank can build a game around rapidly moving from world to world through rifts because they've committed to PS5, fundamentally changing the way that game is built from a design standpoint. Levels can be expansive and span entirely different environments which can all be preloaded and swapped between at will with the SSD, no need to hide load screens between pretty distractions and long-way-around design paths. That is the future of games that Sony pretended to stand for.

It was also a future that they turned around and tried to sell to fans, pretty confident of the fact they'd be turning around on that promise as they did so. Not once in the launch year did Sony make it abundant that backwards generational gaming would be a part of their structure, in fact they implied the exact opposite. "If you want to play the newest games, you have to sell your firstborn so that you can afford a PS5", that was the massaging. One has to wondering if gamers would have been so desperate to kowtow to these scalpers if they'd have been aware of the fact that their PS4's would be perfectly capable of running all the cool new games that Sony was teasing? In a way this is exploitation of their own customers in order to drive up sales, without thinking of any potential backlash, how this might effect customer trust or- I dunno- "What if scalpers got in there and made everything ten times more worse?"

But I have to come around with the question, does this really matter? In the long run? I don't mean the whole 'lying to your audience to drive up sales', that certainly matters in terms of deceptive practises. I mean to say; does it matter to the games industry that Sony isn't going to be cutting things off nearer as hardline as they promised to do? For a third part developer I'd reckon not, because console developers and their machinations have absolutely no bearing on the whims and wants of first party studios, just their performance. It's in the interest of developers like that to sell their game to as many people as possible, and if Sony are still struggling to get PS5's into the hands of the wanting then it just makes no sense to start making games exclusively for the next generation. Similarly, Sony can hardly enforce an industry jump forward when their two competitors, Microsoft and Nintendo, are actively encouraging a slower scale improvement. Progress can only expand as far as the lowest common denominator, remember, and unless Microsoft is ready to take an entire generation's worth back-seat to Sony, they'll never let the games jump forward without them.

This does mean that the promise of a lot of the newer Sony games has been tainted somewhat, and I do understand fans who've lost their ravenous appetite somewhat as a result. I'm sure that God of War Ragnarok is still going to be a masterpiece and 'Horizon: Forbidden West' was stun and wow the world, and Cyberpunk's eventual next gen exclusives will come out to utterly whelm people; but they'll be short of the potential that they might have had, and that's a genuine shame. Although on the flipside, one must remember that it's important not to give oneself to the next generation of hardware too readily, or you'll end up with shovelware tech-demo garbage that has no soul behind it and exists only to say "Look at this- couldn't do this with last year's Dev kit!".

It seems the bar is ever being pushed further in regards to what games are ultimately capable of, and the balance of how hard to push and when to leave the old behind is one that'll likely tax the industry until the end of days. Not many other artforms have to deal with hard technological leaps and divides like this, and there's so much nuance to take into account every step of the way. I'd fully understand it if Sony completely believe they'd go the way they promised to and changed their mind when the industry just wasn't as flexible as they wanted to be. However, even if that was the case it's abundantly clear they knew they'd be changing direction well before the second PS5 games trailer (as has been leaked from associated studios) and so their lies undoubtedly were conscious and vindictive. So remember, when a company makes a promise it always only extends as far as it remain profitable to them; if there's chance it might be better for them not to uphold their end of the bargain: don't believe them. Sony is not your friend.