Some of you may have noticed that Tuffcub stood in for us last week. The ‘What If’ microwave had a malfunction and we ended up running from T-Rex’s and dodging Pterodactyl’s, but we thought you wouldn’t be interested in hearing about that so we recharged it and now we’re back.
So, what question did we pose to our time-travelling cooking utensil this week? Well, considering recent news about Sony’s phenomenal losses, we asked: What if Sony said “We quit”? Raen and I were nervous to ask such a question due to the fact that we didn’t want to see a world without the Playstation, but curiosity got the better of us. With some flapping, some twisting and some kicking, we found ourselves in the not too distant future; April 2010, to be exact.
We appeared at the back of a Sony press conference and the buzz of the room was immense; almost as much as when the PS3 was launched. No one was really sure what was happening or what was being announced. Sure, there were lots of speculations flying about the room but none were prepared for what was to come. In short, Sony said that they were suspending all further development and support for the Playstation brand.
Immediately, the gaming world went into uproar. No more DLC, no more PSN and no more new games. God of War 3 had come out though so that’s something I suppose. Needless to say, PS3’s immediately began appearing for a fraction of their usual cost and Sony were taking all the money they could get from the system. Now gamers had only one choice in the next-gen world; the XBox 360. It didn’t take long before Microsoft started to see unimaginable increases in sales of…well, everything.
Due to Sony’s departure, previously Playstation-Exclusive developers quickly began changing their plans to the 360 and previously released exclusives were turned into 360 games; albeit with some major differences due to the lack of disc space.
But, in this fictional 2010, a major announcement was made by a console ‘noob’ about their plans to join the market. The company in question? Apple. At E3 2010 Apple unveiled their plans for a console which was due to arrive in 2012. This still left Microsoft with a major advantage. By late 2010, every gamer out there, bar a few die-hard fan boys, were now playing on the XBox. The additional revenue for Microsoft was phenomenal; not only from console sales, but also from the £25-50 online fee. But this also caused some major problems. Xbox Live started to face massive issues due to the shear number of unforeseen customers and Microsoft had to invest millions into the service in order to keep it up. As a result, they hiked the Live price and people had no option but to pay.
Games started to become stale as the lack of competition lead to no real original content coming out and the market place began to get flooded with games, and the majority of people couldn’t keep up with the financial strain of so many products. Less popular, or lesser-hyped titles, failed miserably and their developers slowly went under.
This situation began to depress Raen and I so we pressed fast-forward to see if and when Sony would get back in the game (pun intended). It was in 2015, after surviving the global recession and seeing business pick up again, that Sony finally revisited the Playstation brand. In an attempt to storm the market they re-released the PS3 slim at a cheap £125; but the big news came when they revealed that they had been secretly working on the Playstation 4 for a couple of years now.
But we couldn’t watch. Even if the consumers were crying out for a new console and more diversity, Microsoft had gained such a massive financial boost from their departure that even a PS4 would struggle to win people back, and with the fact that many developers had already made the switch to the 360, it would be a couple of years before the PS4 came into its own.
We left this horrible timeline with no regrets. We liked having a choice and we liked the diversity of our games. In short, we like the 360 and we like Playstation. The pair are necessary for a healthy balanced diet of games, even if you only own one.
