PS5’s greatest enemy is Sony not Xbox – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader argues that Sony’s poor communication and anti-consumer tendencies are more of a threat to PS5 than Microsoft and Xbox.

What a year it’s been, eh? We’re barely a month into 2022 and already we’ve had acquisitions by the boatload, hints at a PlayStation version of Game Pass, and even a half-decent Nintendo Direct. Microsoft’s aggressive tactics have obviously got a lot of PlayStation 5 owners anxious, as is obvious from the stream of Reader’s Features on the subject, all of which I’ve enjoyed and agreed with to some degree or another.

At the risk of jumping on the bandwagon I also want to talk about the PlayStation 5 and its likelihood, or not, of ‘beating’ the Xbox Series X. But I don’t want to discuss the hardware or even the games, but rather the one thing I think Sony is unequivocally awful at: communication.

The idea of Sony ‘arrogance’ is a well-known insult but it’s one that was not earned without reason, even if the guiltiest culprits (Phil Harrison and Kaz Hirai) are no longer involved with PlayStation. During the PlayStation 3 era in particular they acted as if Sony was the undisputed king of video gaming and it didn’t matter what other companies did to try and un-throne them, including selling more consoles than them.

Sony clearly recognised this was a problem in the lead up to the PlayStation 4 launch, as while you wouldn’t necessarily call them humble they did admit their mistakes and did their best to ensure they didn’t repeat them. With the PlayStation 5 the arrogance hasn’t returned so much in terms of what they say, but the way they’re acting.

For a start, Sony seem to hate talking to their customers. Although his persona as a ‘gamer just like you’ is clearly a carefully constructed projection