Sony should’ve never made the PS5 and kept with the PS4

A reader suggests that Sony would’ve been better off releasing a more advanced PS4 Pro rather than start the current generation with the PS5.

We’ve had a lot of disgruntled PlayStation 5 owners writing in recently, but the one that caught my eye was last week’s Reader’s Feature about someone who said they weren’t going to bother buying one, as they didn’t see any point in upgrading their PlayStation 4. As someone that did make that jump I can sympathise with that, although it would mean missing out on great exclusives such as Demon’s Souls, Returnal, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

However, I have a hard time imagining that these games wouldn’t be possible on a PlayStation 4. Maybe the graphics wouldn’t be quite as good (probably not even that for Returnal) but they’re definitely not doing anything that screams ‘this has to be next gen!’

Your mileage may vary but the point I would like to make is that I’m not sure that Sony gained anything from making the PlayStation 5 and they seem to have lost an awful lot in terms of how much more expensive it is to make games now.

Things were going great with the PlayStation 4 though. The games were good, fans were happy, PlayStation was easily beating Xbox… Sony were on top of their game. By the end sales were starting to fall, like they always do, but rather than make the PlayStation 5 couldn’t they have just made a new model of PlayStation 4? A Super PS4 Pro or something.

For such a small improvement in graphics it really doesn’t seem like this generation was worth the trouble, not given all the problems it’s brought and given how short it’s apparently going to last. The only significant change has been the SSD but make that part of the Super PS4 Pro and you’ve got a unique selling point right there.

Obviously, it’s too late now but I know of nothing that suggests Sony ever considered this and they’ve said nothing that implies they’re going to take their time with the PlayStation 6. Instead, given Xbox has already said they’re working on a next gen machine, I don’t imagine it’ll be that long until Sony starts talking about their next console.

This is stupid. There’s no other word for it. Sony and Microsoft knew games would be even more expensive to make this gen, but they went ahead anyway. That would’ve been okay, up to a point, if they had some sort of plan for dealing with it. But it’s clear they didn’t. Instead, it looks like the problem took them by surprise which is… stupid.

And now they’re going to go ahead and commit exactly the same mistake again and make the problem even worse. Can’t wait till those next gen games take seven years to make and costs $400 million apiece!

If you’re reading this and thinking that purposefully holding back and not going with higher tech consoles when they are possible is the stupid thing, then consider Nintendo. They’ve been doing exactly that since the Wii and last time I checked they’re doing okay. They way they talk also shows they think a lot about the long term than PlayStation and Xbox ever seem to.

Someone there must be strategising things out, but I’d love to know what the plan is. I’ve got a nasty feeling the final step is ‘profit’ and the one before that is just ‘???’ – if you know what I mean.

So there, that’s my solution for the games industry’s current problems: buy Sony a time machine and uninvent the PlayStation 5. I’m sorry I couldn’t think of anything more practical.

By reader Hogie

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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