On February 20, 2013 Sony held a press conference in New York City to reveal their up and coming software, Playstation 4. What viewers got instead was all hype with no payoff.
The main reason for the conference was for Sony to show off the Playstation 4 hardware. They did talk about some of the things the Playstation 4 can do, like how “load times will be a thing of the past,” how social the console is and the “suspend/resume” function and revealed the controller, which looks like a weird fourth party Playstation 3 controller. However, even with all that, Sony did not show any of those details, what the hardware looked like, what its specs are or even a price.
There was also a total lack of first party games presented at the conference. The games presented were mediocre at best. The only games worth mentioning are “Destiny,†a new “Infamous†game and “Watch Dogs,†a game that looks like a modern day “Assassins Creed.†The poorest excesses were Square-Enix showing off a tech demo that they already showed off at E3 months ago and Blizzard’s big announcement being “Diablo 3†was coming for PS4, a game people already have played on the PC for over a year.
The problem with all these games is that they all looked like they belonged on the Playstation 3. The Playstation 4’s graphical capabilities looked more like it was Playstation 3.5 than a next gen console.
One big unneeded thing at the conference was the Playstation Move demonstration with the puppets playing instruments. If that was Sony’s idea of selling the Move then it didn’t pay off the way they wanted. That demo was more low-brow hilarity than genius. Sorry Sony, people won’t be buying the Move because of that.
In the end, Sony’s press conference was a major letdown. Months of media buildup and all gamers get is nothing more than a few games that looked like they belonged on this gen consoles, no first party games and a lack of hardware presence or price. This may have hurt Sony’s chances in the next console race.
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