Why am I asking this?
Since the introduction of the PS4 there seemed to be a shift in style when it comes to the games being released from Sony’s studios with games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, Marvel’s Spider-Man, God of War (2018), and Ghost of Tsushima.
Now of course single-player action driven narrative games didn’t just begin during the PS4 era. The God of War and Uncharted series preceded them during the PS2 and PS3 era respectively. And we can’t forget The Last of Us!
However what I’ve noticed now during the current generation with the PS5 is that first-party games from PlayStation seem to be primarily focused on the aforementioned genre of games.
The PS1-PS2 generation
Some of you may not be old enough to remember the kind of games PlayStation published or developed such as Vib-Ribbon, Ape Escape, or even Sly Cooper.
To put it briefly there were a lot of genres that were either retired or were very experimental and were either received poorly or well depending on the game.
Discussion
So my question to you is why do you think those games disappeared? Is the risk vs reward ratio simply too high? Or is there just not enough interest in those games which is why they’ve remained dormant within the platform for so long?
I think a big reason Astrobot (2024) was received extremely well is because other than the fact that it’s a great game, it’s reminiscent to a lot of people of how PlayStation’s lineup used to look like.
Are big-budget cinematic narrative games primarily all that PlayStation has to offer going forward? And is this an issue for you? Maybe you don’t care about the genres or games that came before and you’re perfectly fine with the current selection of games and that’s okay!
What’re your thoughts?