Season 17, Episode 18

What do we call this now? I guess we’re in the E3 season, but we can’t really call it that anymore since E3 is all but dead at this point. So the new game announcement season? I don’t know what to call it but someone with much more creativity than me will figure it out. […]

What do we call this now?

I guess we’re in the E3 season, but we can’t really call it that anymore since E3 is all but dead at this point.

So the new game announcement season? I don’t know what to call it but someone with much more creativity than me will figure it out. And it’ll be simple as hell and staring us in the face the entire time. Whatever it’ll be called, we just got our first taste of it with Sony’s PlayStation Showcase.

It was…okay. I mean, they showed off a lot of new games but how many of those are going to be selling PS5’s? Very few of them we saw were exclusives to the system and even some of them coming from first party studios were also getting PC releases (mostly the live service games we saw). Other than that it was a lot of multiplatform games and Spider-Man. And Spidey didn’t feel like it was moving the needle into killer app territory.

Sony does seem to be putting in a lot of work into the live service game category. Now, I know those will have a PC release as well as a console release and may even get multiplatform releases on the Switch and Xbox, but this wasn’t a move I was expecting from Sony. There were, at the very least, 3 different live service game announcements all from Sony, two or more maybe from first party studios. And I’m not including Destiny in that mix. It remains to be seen how they’ll market those. Free to play? Subscription service? Will we see some sort of Sony storefront on PC or maybe a PC PlayStation Plus, perhaps?

We’ll find out in time, of course, but all in all, it was kind of a weak showing from Sony. Because while there were a lot of games, it was hardly a handful that Sony could claim as their own and point to for a reason to buy their system. Not that I’ve got much faith in Microsoft either, but that’s coming in the next few days and, well, they’ve got Starfield so…yeah.

None of them, however, have Splinter Cell because it has been 3,562 days since a new Splinter Cell game (non-animated series or guest spot in another game franchise, remake, BBC radio drama, or VR exclusive) was released.