Xbox and PlayStation disagree on the future of the forever game

polygon.com:

Now the dust has settled on Xbox’s and PlayStation’s big summer showcases, it’s a good time to compare them and look for evidence of where each company is heading — or thinks it’s heading.

As has increasingly been the case over the last few years, the two presentations were very different. Most observers feel that Xbox had the better show, in terms of the number and range of titles shown and the promise of its future slate. But there’s only so much you can read into this — the most plausible conclusion is simply that post-pandemic production issues are hitting Sony’s family of studios a year or so later than they hit Microsoft’s and Ubisoft’s, leaving it with a gap between this year’s Spider-Man 2 and far-off prospects like Bungie’s Marathon. Like its rival has this summer, Sony will probably be able to bounce back in a year’s time.

It’s more interesting to look at the substance of the games shown, and what those can tell us about the two platform holders’ priorities.

There’s no mistaking what Sony is up to. The PlayStation owner has been vocal about its desire to get into the business of live-service games in a big way, and how this motivated its acquisition of Destiny maker Bungie. Lo and behold, in terms of new reveals from first-party PlayStation studios, the showcase gave us:

Little is known about these games, but Marathon has explicitly been set up to be a long-term “living” game, and it doesn’t seem like a stretch to put Fairgame$ and Concord in the same bucket. There’s a striking tonal and genre similarity between these projects, too. Sony seems keen to exploit Bungie’s heritage by leaning hard on genres and stylings that have been proven to draw a service game audience on PlayStation — specifically sci-fi