Editorial: The Broken Promises of PS4

With PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on the way, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are coming to an end. While they’ll still live on for a couple more years, the focus is going to transition to these new consoles. With that said, we figured it would be a great time to look back on the promises Sony made for PS4 and see how many of them came to fruition.

We’re only looking at what was promised pre-launch of the PS4 in 2013. So, we’re taking a look at the reveal event in February 2013 and E3 2013 in June of that same year. We’ll also be holding Xbox to a similar standard in another article in the near future.

We’ll just give a quick rundown on the promises the PS4 lived up to.

• Ability to suspend and resume games
• Download/upload things while playing games or using apps
• Shareplay is a real thing
• Livestreaming and recording
• Remote play on Vita, has now extended to other mobile devices
• PS4 delivered on visual fidelity promised at the events
• DualShock 4 lightbar can be tracked by PS Camera
• PSNow does exist

While that might seem small, many of these were big game changers at the time and have laid the groundwork for gaming as we know it. Unfortunately, Sony wasn’t able to do this for all their promises.

PSN pre-loads games based on your playing habits

One of the most notable takeaways I had from watching the 2013 reveal event was the focus on the cloud. There was a promise that the PS4 and PSN would learn what you liked/disliked and then downloads games that it thinks you’d enjoy. If you played Call of Duty every year, it would likely download the new Call of Duty for you when it released without you even pressing the buy button.

I’m sure there are a number of reasons why this was scrapped. The cloud was picking games people didn’t care about, interfering with data caps, eating HDD space, and more. It’s an interesting concept but probably one that would’ve annoyed people.

You can sample full games for free without buying them

Sony was aiming to get rid of demos in favor of just allowing you to play pieces of full games. These would’ve been streamed as opposed to downloaded to allow users to try before they buy. This never happened, in fact we’re still getting demos as Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Final Fantasy VII Remake all released demos this year.

Allowing your friends to watch you play and interact with the game in unique ways

While Shareplay does exist and you can basically virtually hand the controller to someone else, there was an extension to this concept. Sony pitched the ability to have your friends directly interact with the world by just watching. The pitch was a bit vague but you’d have buttons to press that can drop in special items or create special events as you watch your friends play their game.

This was very loosely done with Twitch where chat can trigger certain things to happen in some select horror games if you enable the option. It doesn’t really seem that this was that exact idea, though.

Ready to Play and immediate access

While the PS4 does feature the ability to play games while they’re installing, it’s not all they chalked it up to be. Not all games use it and there are a number of them that only let you stare at the main menu until it’s done installing. It’s great when properly utilized but it’s not included in every single game at the way they promised.

There was also a strong emphasis on “immediacy”. That you should be able to boot up the console and just start playing. That’s the case for games that are already downloaded but even then, you might be halted by an update. You also have to install every game and nowadays, most AAA games are big boys that take up dozens upon dozens of GBs. Some games are even shipping on two discs now to account for that.

Original entertainment programming

Back in 2013, platform holders felt their consoles had to move beyond just games. With Netflix and such, there was a heavy emphasis for these consoles to push consoles into all-around entertainment systems. While Xbox dove a lot harder into this, PlayStation wanted to dabble into it as well.

They announced they’d be producing a PlayStation exclusive show called Powers, an adaptation of a comic-book series. The show had two seasons, airing in 2015 and 2016 respectively, but was canceled 3 months after the second season aired. This was the only PlayStation exclusive show to ever be produced.

It is worth noting that Sony recently started “PlayStation Productions”. This will allow IP such as Uncharted and more to be explored through film and TV. The difference here is that Powers could only be watched on PlayStation devices, with the exception of some freebies on Crackle and YouTube. PlayStation Productions aims to make these new projects available in theaters, HBO, and more.

Deep Down

I still have no idea what Deep Down is. Capcom came on stage at the PS4 reveal event and announced this crazy cool looking medieval game where some armored knight-types try to fight a dragon before calling upon Blanka from Street Fighter for help. The game is said to still be alive within Capcom but we have no idea if it’ll ever be finished.