PlayStation Year in Review: A steady but subdued year for Sony, despite its noisy neighbors and a visit from Spider-Man
Dec. 21, 2023Opinion | A big year for video games, but a distinctly normal-sized one for PlayStation
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Marvel’s Spider-Man 2was the obvious challenger here from a commercial and critical perspective, and while it’s difficult to compare the two directly (we’ll dig into that further down the page),Insomniac Games' second crack at the red-suited superhero quickly became the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game over a 24-hour period,selling more than 2.5 million copies in a single day.
Final Fantasy 16was received well at launch in June, wowing players with its combat, voice acting, and spectacle (I’ll leave fans of the series to debate the strength of its story, mind you); while the much-anticipatedFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirthwas pushed back several months into next year. The PS5 had this year’s runaway hitBaldur’s Gate 3all to itself in the console space for several weeks; whereas timed-PS5-exclusive Forspoken didn’t quite live up to expectations. PSVR 2 excelled, not least by way of Horizon Call of the Mountain; yet the company’s marqueePlayStation Showcaseand State of Play events too often flattered to deceive. And so went the last 12 months for PlayStation – seemingly matching many of its forward strides with one or two in the opposite direction.
The state of play
Ahead of May’s PlayStation-focused event, I ran a headline that read:Sony simply turning up at the PlayStation Showcase will keep Xbox on the ropes. With the virtue of hindsight, I’ll be the first to admit that I missed the mark at top-level – Sony ultimately delivered a lukewarm presentation – but I nevertheless stand by the points made within. Xbox console-exclusive Redfall, aka Microsoft’s biggest blunder of the year, was barely behind us when this particular PlayStation Showcase rolled around, and we were less than a month on from a Microsoft earnings report that statedXbox hardware revenue had plummeted 30% in the previous year. At the same time, Sony had announced that thePS5 was selling faster than PS4 in the US despite years of console shortages, and that thePS5 had passed 500 million home consoles soldas a result.
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“The Sony State of Play event in September did a far better job of stirring hype for what lies ahead – even if much of that extends into next year”
Elsewhere on PlayStation’s coming soon radar sits The Last of Us 2 Remastered (January 19) and Pacific Drive (February 22); with a number of TBC labels hanging over everything from Phantom Blade 0, Sword of the Sea,Hideo Kojima’s new project OD, Concord, Marathon, the Silent Hill 2 remake, andMarvel’s Wolverine. To the latter end, the catastrophic Insomniac leaks that unfolded this week at the hands of hackers dealt a devastating blow to all of those on the receiving end.
The depth, scale, and scope of the leaked material that’s now in the public domain is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in video games, and is certainly a sore one for Insomniac who’d otherwise be riding high into the New Year buoyed by its latest successful release. This is indeed a notable set-back for a first-party PlayStation studio, but ifRockstar Games' recent trajectory in the face of high-profile leaks is anything to go by – from its own in-development content hack last year through to this month’s stellarGTA 6trailer – then I’m confident Insomniac has what it takes to bounce back once it’s dusted itself down and is raring to go again.
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