Was Sony’s PlayStation Showcase a disappointment? –

Sony kicked off the 2023 gaming summer this week with its PlayStation Showcase, an event that excited millions. Now that we’ve had a few days to cool off from the livestream, it feels good to talk about it pretty openly. We didn’t have the pre-show hype or the post-show depression weighing on us, so we think we can give it an adequate evaluation.

So, was the PlayStation Showcase a disappointment? Well, it certainly wasn’t great. We won’t look back on this show in a few years and wonder how Sony pulled off such an incredible event. Instead, like the vast majority of these showcases if we’re honest, the 2023 PlayStation Showcase will possibly fade into memory before the year is out.

Does this mean we have nothing to talk about at all? No, of course not. The show was not a complete disaster, as we have more than a few announcements worth mentioning. Metal Gear Solid Δ, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Marathon and of course Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 are perhaps the biggest announcements of the show, but even among the smaller reveals such as Ghostrunner 2, The Talos Principle 2, Neva and more there is plenty to get excited about for fans of those titles. However, there are two major problems with this showcase, and the first is that although we saw a lot, it feels like Sony was aiming for quantity over quality.

In reality, the vast majority of these trailers barely showed us gameplay or we already got it. What did we actually learn about Marathon, for example, or Concord, or Metal Gear Solid Δ? Sure, we can learn a little more about those titles thanks to PS Blog posts and the like, but then what’s the point of the showcase? Many of the titles that were shown could have just been relegated to blog posts to give us more of what we were interested in. We are left at the end of an hour-long presentation counting our blessings that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 appeared, rather than otherwise seeing it as the icing on the cake of a fantastic showcase.

The fact that we wanted more details about first-party games and that other great and exciting titles are coming to other platforms leaves us with our second big problem with this showcase, and that is the unknown future of PlayStation. This showcase was meant to show us exactly that. We should be going into the second half of the PS5’s life cycle knowing that we will get at least some of the most important games, but instead, after Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, we wonder what’s next. There are a few projects in the rumor mill and some things previously announced, like Insomniac’s Wolverine, but this showcase should have given us some more titbits about those games, while ignoring them leaves us with a rather uneasy feeling in our stomachs.

I have no doubt – unless something goes seriously, seriously wrong – that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will be great, and third-party titles can also help fill in the time between first-party releases that Sony has become synonymous with in recent years. But once Spider-Man launches, what are Sony consumers looking forward to? What’s the next big thing?

Gluttony? If so, that’s a lot of weight on Insomniac’s shoulders. We’re not saying a great first-party game won’t make headlines, but if we bring our thoughts back to this time last year, we knew we were getting God of War: Ragnarok and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, with one project to look forward to for now and another to keep an eye on later. As we get closer to that fall 2023 date for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, it leaves a lot of anxiety about what Sony does next, because without its big exclusives some may start to wonder what they are buying a PS5 for. VR won’t make it, not in the state it’s in, and the Wii U clone won’t clone it either.

In short, yes the PlayStation Showcase was a disappointment. Not because we didn’t see much, but because we didn’t see much depth to what we did see. Moreover, this showcase – bar Spider-Man – feels like it could have been made by any other major game brand, with more headlining third-party releases than anything else.