With more news about the PlayStation 6 starting to appear, a reader feels that the appearance of Valve’s Steam Machine will have a big impact on Sony’s plans.
You’d think the demise of Xbox would be cause for celebration amongst PlayStation fans, but it hasn’t turned out like that at all, from anything I’ve seen. Maybe it’s because Xbox hasn’t been a true rival for a while now but the exit of Phil Spencer and the annoucement of Project Helix hasn’t even been a blip on the radar of anyone I’ve spoken to.
Most of them are too busy complaining about the current state of PlayStation 5 and while the rumours about Sony moving away from the PC are promising they are only rumours and we don’t know anything for sure.
But I’m optimistic about that change, assuming it’s real, because it seems to show that Sony is wiling to listen to fans when it comes to the PlayStation 6. I like the idea of a PlayStation 5 handheld too but the thing I’m most interested in is the Steam Machine because, unlike Xbox, it could provide some actual competition to Sony.
Any sensible fan will tell you that they need competition. It’d be awful if Xbox or PlayStation became too dominant and I think a lot of problems with the PlayStation 5 generation is it’s been made obvious that it doesn’t really matter what Sony does, because people haven’t got an alternative.
There’s a lot of reasons that they’ve stopped making as many single-player games but I think one of the big ones is that they don’t need to. Exclusives are one of the main reasons that anyone picks one console over another, but if PlayStation 5 is the only choice, when it comes to high-end games, that’s not really an issue, so why bother spending the money making them?
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But with Steam Machine, Sony is going to have to think about what it’s doing again. Remember, coming off the back of the PlayStation 3, Sony was in high alert mode. If the Xbox 360 hadn’t sabotaged itself, it would’ve won that generation and Sony knew it. So they went all out with the PlayStation 4 and its games.
The PlayStation 5 was off to a similar start but while there were multiple factors for why things stopped, I think one of them was that they realised the Xbox Series X/S was such a flop out of the gate there wasn’t any need.
We don’t know what exactly Valve’s approach is going to be for the Steam Machine but there’s talk of Half-Life 3 and that is not going to appear on PlayStation 5, I would guess. There may be other Valve exclusives but even if there’s not the Steam Machine can run any PC game, which includes many great games that aren’t on PlayStation.
I’m sure this is one of the other reasons that Sony is pulling away from PC. They don’t want PlayStation games appearing on the next gen Xbox, but no one’s going to buy that so it’s not as big a deal. But a Valve PC/console hybrid that will probably do very well? That’s a real danger.
So while we know very little about the PlayStation 6 at the moment, I feel the signs are all good: rumours of going back to exclusives and single-player games, and real competition that will force Sony to make an effort.
I’d also hope that they’ve generally learnt from the mess this generation has been and welcome a new start just as much as we would. So while there is some grim news out there, I’m looking forward to the future of PlayStation.
By reader Iceman
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