PlayStation’s latest State of Play showcase was tepid - get used to it

techradar.com:

The latest PlayStation State of Play showcase has been and gone, showering us with another round of trailers and reveals. Interdimensional dinosaur-hunting shooter Exoprimal was revealed to a collective eyebrow-raise, Ghostwire: Tokyo received a final pre-launch trailer, Valkyrie Elysium was announced as the next installment of a long-forgotten RPG series, and Returnal arguably stole the show with its upcoming co-op expansion.

That’s a lot of games, interspersed with a fair few world-first reveals. So why did I find the whole thing singularly uninteresting? It might have something to do with the fact I was watching it at 10pm in a hotel room, after waking up 14 hours earlier, while flipping the biggest announcements into news stories. There’s probably something to be said against mixing work and pleasure.

But more substantially, my tepid reaction says more about the nature of these showcase streams than it does the games revealed within them. All the big three console manufacturers have adopted the format. Sony has its regular State of Plays, the House of Mario reels out infrequent but substantial Nintendo Directs, and Microsoft has its, less regular, Xbox showcases. They all serve a similar purpose: to highlight their console’s most exciting new releases, while bookending less interesting titles between blockbuster reveals to maintain the hype.

Game publishers used to save all of their biggest reveals for the middle of the year, but the slow demise of E3 has largely put an end to that. The rise of corporate livestreaming, bolstered by the compulsory distancing of the pandemic, has pushed them away from centralized scheduling in favor of regular, seasonal updates. There’s little point in waiting for June to roll around when