PlayStation Promises Fulfilled? Coming? Or Here?

Remember back to February 20, 2013 when Sony revealed the PS4 and wowed us with games and features? Now that we are over a year past the announcement, how do those promises stand up? Everybody wants to talk about Microsoft’s back-peddling but let’s take a look at PlayStation’s follow through.

How about those games? I don’t know about you, but I never even had a spark of interest in Knack. Although I don’t think it is a bad game, I’m just not interested in it. Granted Call of Duty: Ghosts was the best seller on both the PS4 and Xbox One, there was little that caught the imagination exclusive to the PS4 until inFAMOUS: Second Son was released, and some would debate if that game was a deal breaker in any way. I did like Killzone: Shadow Fall, but even as a huge fan of the series, I couldn’t force myself to tell anyone that this is a must have and use it as a console seller.

So did PS4 follow through on its promise of great games? I’m not sure, especially when you look at the arena of exclusives. Few if any of the exclusives are what would be called AAA titles, and even some of the indie exclusives were only debut exclusives, not lifelong exclusives.

Looking forward there aren’t many exclusives looking to light up the world either. Sure, Little Big Planet 3 looks great, but I don’t want that game. Even with Destiny’s exclusive content I don’t see much draw to the PS4, although it is the platform I will buying the game on, because that was already decided before the exclusives were announced.

As for the cross-consoles games I’ve seen, there is little if anything that PlayStation has done to make its platform rise above the Xbox One, and don’t even get into the resolution/fps argument with me, please. There are bigger promises that I want to address.

Doesn’t it sound awesome to be broadcasting your gameplay, having a friend watching, and even having that friend take over the game? Hell yeah, that sound does sound awesome, but we still don’t have it. This was a big feature that PlayStation executives touted in the Feb 2013 press event but have yet to deliver. In a recent interview Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, lamented that this and other features are not yet available.

“Our team has been working on it. There are some things that we announced in February of last year that were not planned for the launch timeframe.”

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to hit the power button in the middle of your game, go about your business, then comeback to your game almost instantly by hitting the power button again? That would be cool, but we don’t have that either. It goes into the same boat as the previously discussed feature. But when asked about when it will be ready, Youshida said:

“I am asking the same question to my tech team every other week. Because every day I get reminded by lots of people: ‘Where is this? Where is that?’ It’s a great reminder for me.”

It would be the bomb if games I wanted were already loaded before I bought them or before they were available! Well…this one you get half of. The promise at the reveal was a predictive technology that would pre-download games based on your preferences whether you had purchased them or not. What we do get is the ability to pre-download games that we digitally pre-order, but are not playable until the actual release date. This was announced to be available for Destiny but it sounds like it will be available for some other PS4 titles as well and maybe sooner.

Remember this guy? Don’t feel bad, nobody really does. This was David Perry, co-founder and CEO of Gaikai that came on stage to talk about the game streaming service that we now know as PlayStation Now. This is another promise that gets a half-pass since the service is still in beta, which is about to expand, but Perry had spoke of streaming PS4 games whereas PS Now is touted as only streaming PS3, PS One, and PS Classic games. The talk was somewhat ambiguous in that he implied the Gaikai/PSN technology would connect gamers not necessarily by streaming games in a playable format, but by Remote Play as a form of PS4 streamed gameplay. Since the service is still in beta, I can only give a grade of: Incomplete.

So…where do we go from here? Since none of these features have been officially canceled, I can only sit and wait.  Working in the field of technology, I understand that there are limitations of what can and can’t be done, given the boundaries of said technology, and that there are forces outside of PlayStation’s control.

Bear in mind that I am a huge PlayStation fan and write this in the hopes that these promises will be delivered upon at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later. Let me know if you feel otherwise or the same.

Paul Novak is a self described Polish ninja toiling away as an IT professional but more into gaming and writing. Physically existing in the west side of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania yet existentially flowing with the ether of the Internet. Found here at What’s Your Tag? and on the Twitter @dudewantshisrug. Game on with Team XBRO!