2024 was a big year for win Game of the Year, Astro Bot showed a clear demand for original games over recent remaster projects. While there's still plenty of financial incentive for PlayStation to continue its current remastering strategy, it's far from the winning model the company is known for.
PlayStation used to be known for having some of the best exclusives on the market, featuring many exciting games of all different sizes. In recent years, PlayStation has seemed to put most of its resources into incredibly expensive releases with much greater scope instead, leaving the smaller-scale projects to indie developers. While PlayStation's massively open-world or high-fidelity gaming experiences go on to receive plenty of sales and critical acclaim, they desperately need projects to fill the gaps between each release.
Sony Needs To Make More Smaller-Scale Games On PS5
Giving Players A Wider Range Of Gaming Experiences
The most obvious answer to PlayStation's lack of exclusives is to focus its resources on smaller-scale games, similar to the recent Astro Bot or the likes of Ratchet and Clank: A Rift in Time. Not only would these games help fill the gaps between PlayStation's heavy-hitting blockbuster games, but the lessened resources needed would allow for a wider assortment of valued exclusives for PlayStation fans. The biggest problem with this alternative strategy is the success of each project can vary greatly, compared to the more reliable popularity of remakes and remasters in recent years.
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Rather than putting the resources from a game like the Horizon Zero Dawn remaster, Sony could have used the developers at Guerilla to work on a new entry in the beloved Killzone franchise. The latest Helldivers 2 fiasco showed there's still a clear interest in the classic Killzone franchise, being one of the many prime IPs Sony has forgotten over the years that could be a massive draw to its exclusive library. When compared to the costs of riskier ventures like Concord and its massive budget, estimated at around $400 million, smaller-scale original projects or sequels to beloved franchises could be PlayStation's saving grace in the coming years, especially between its more reliable game releases.
Sony has plenty of options to satisfy fans without breaking any budgets.
While Lego: Horizon Adventures fits the criteria for a smaller-scale PS5 game, its niche demographic, targeting fans of both Horizon and LEGO, resulted in less than stellar sales. Luckily, Horizon Adventures could still prove to be a valuable games deserving of a remake or sequel, Sony has plenty of options to satisfy fans without breaking any budgets.
Unnecessary Remasters Might Continue To Falter
Remaster Fatigue Is Becoming A Common Problem For Many Players
Aside from squeezing out more money from its most successful franchises, another incentive for Sony's obsession with remasters is likely tied to the limited library of PlayStation exclusives. Coinciding with the release of the PlayStation 5 Pro, these remastered titles also aim to push the console to its limits while adding more value to the hardware upgrade. Despite the success of their original releases, PlayStation's latest remastered titles have been hit with waves of criticism alongside wildly varying sales between them.
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The biggest complaints with PlayStation's recent remasters have been over the apparent lack of a real need for an even more polished edition. While nearly seven years have ed since Horizon Zero Dawn's first release date, the game looks and runs fantastically on modern hardware, with differences in its remaster being negligible for the most part. Compared to this, The Last of Us Part 2 and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 both received remasters only a couple of years after each release, leaving Sony fans in a state of confusion over the reasoning behind each launch.
This news is especially painful alongside the ever-increasing demand for remasters or remakes for beloved classics stuck on outdated hardware, with the heavy desire for a Bloodborne remaster being the most common talking point around the subject. Bloodborne has notably never received a current-gen update like many other PlayStation exclusives, and while it enjoys faster load times on PS5, it is still capped at 30fps and runs at lower resolutions than it could.
There's no assurance PlayStation will continue to hold its larger market share forever.
While next-generation remasters might be cheaper than the massive undertaking of delivering new experiences for the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us, or God of War, a greater variety of smaller-scale gameplay experiences offers an exciting alternative, providing a beneficial boon for the PlayStation 5 ecosystem. Given that much of the PlayStation 5's momentum has come from the massive success of the PlayStation 4, and Microsoft's mismanagement of Xbox, there's no assurance PlayStation will continue to hold its larger market share forever.
PlayStation’s Exclusive Library Can’t Keep Dwindling
The Future Of PlayStation Could Be In Trouble
Despite these issues, it's still likely that Sony's systems will continue to dominate the console market in the future. Given the sweeping success of the PlayStation 5, Sony still risks falling behind the times if it doesn't capitalize on the needs of its player base. The 2024 Game Awards is a prime example of shifting player interest in recent years, with the drastically smaller Astro Bot and breakout indie game Balatro winning not just as many, but more awards than their larger-budget and triple-A counterparts respectively.
While big-budget experiences still tend to dominate the gaming landscape, it seems more players are starting to value satisfying gameplay over graphical fidelity that's becoming all the more common as hardware improves, with not every game needing to be a massive open-world cinematic experience.
As the flow of PlayStation exclusives has slowed with how many resources each of the massive projects consumes, on top of this, PlayStation's exclusive game lineup keeps shrinking at a drastic pace as more games get ported to Xbox and PC each year. As the PC market grows exponentially with more Xbox and Sony exclusives moving to PC, on top of the rise of portable gaming consoles like the Steam Deck, it could prove a significant threat to PlayStation's current business model.
While being able to play the same games on any device is always a massive win for the gaming community as a whole, it could be bad news for the hope of PlayStation-funded exclusives and Sony franchises in the long run.
- Brand
- Sony
- Original Release Date
- November 19, 2020
- Original MSRP (USD)
- $399.99 (Digital Only), $499.99 (Disc Drive)
- Weight
- Digital Edition now weighs 3.4 kg & base version weighs 3.9 kg
The fifth flagship video game console from Sony Computer Entertainment, the PlayStation 5, is a part of the ninth generation of consoles. The console features full backwards compatibility with PlayStation 4 games and features a digital storefront that gives access to older generations. The console can output images at 4K resolution, with alternative options including 1440p at 120 frames per second for gameplay. This console is also known for implementing 3D audio, which allows headphones to be connected to the console for simulated spatially accurate audio.
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