There was about six days of silence on social media after PlayStation announced its unimaginably unpopular decision to abandon physical games in a few years.
During that time, angry players waited impatiently for the brand to start posting again after the company went quiet following dropping that massive misstep-bomb ( just the latest of many). Memes were born, and pissed off gamers turned on post notifications so they could swarm and voice their displeasure. And then, this week, the flood gates opened.
It started yesterday with this innocuous video about PS5’s new FlexStrike fight stick. On Twitter/X, the post got immediately ratioed with 65,000 replies and just 11,000 likes since. It continued with another post about July’s PlayStation Plus entries, and another about the promising-looking The Blood of Dawnwalker coming in September.
There have been two more posts today about Mortal Shell II and Apex Legends. And every. Single. Post. Is getting absolutely obliterated in the replies. The attention is being taken entirely away from whatever the company is posting about (I truly feel for anyone being caught in this wholly unnecessary crossfire), and instead hijacked by rightful rage.
It feels really, REALLY unfair to PlayStation’s partners, and all of the blame lies on Sony, not only for making such a loudly anti-consumer decision, but for choosing to ignore the discourse entirely.
I don’t expect Sony to come out and say “oops! Our bad, disc-based games FOREVER!” but man, oh man, how long can this go on? This is clearly not “business as usual.” It’s hard to remember this much of a blowback to any announcement in the company’s history, and I don’t see it ending. And players are absolutely within their rights to do so.
This generation has been utterly mismanaged by PlayStation from beginning to end. An incessant need to push live-service games trying to chase down the next Fortnite has led to colossal failures like Concord, and the unceremonious closure of a beloved studio like Bluepoint Games. Some of its biggest and best studios have gone years without a release (Naughty Dog, what is happening?), and so it feels like the PS5’s awesome hardware has been wasted in many respects.
Video games are a celebration that should be about the players, the games, and the devs that bust their asses to make them. But instead, Sony has torpedoed any good faith it had left with its fans, everyone is enraged, and I’m not sure how it can recover from this. Some accountability would be a good start, but given that the decision to go discless likely came from the very top with little knowledge or feedback elsewhere within the company, I’m not holding out too much hope for that.
Gamers have made it very clear thus far that they will not forget about this all-digital future that Sony has planned for us. We will all be waiting to see what the company’s next move is, because it may be make-or-break for our shared hobby.
