Sony has had a good run recently, with the recent announcements on The Last of Us Part II and Death Stranding on the way, it seems that Sony is on a roll with announcements. Well it seems like that even he most successful companies can fall as we remember the Five Biggest Gaming Industry Mistakes made by Sony PlayStation.
The PlayStation 4 Pro is supposed to be the next best graphical upgrade to the original PlayStation 4. Well that’s true except for one problem the PlayStation 4 Pro originally had a huge flaw in its design. For whatever reason during gameplay on some graphically-intense games, the Pro would get really loud as if the fans in the system were working twice or even three times as hard. It was later found that the system was able to collect a significant amount of dust when just sitting around, causing the fans to go dusty. Well because of the dusty fans, the Pro had to work pretty hard to get the air to cycle through the system, so it would make due by working way too hard, and causing the fans to go into overdrive.
Of course the fans weren’t the only problem when the PlayStation 4 Pro came out, all sorts of problems were causing users of the Pro a lot of ire when it first released. Sometimes the console wouldn’t display games at 1080p or higher for that matter. Among other things, updates that would benefit from the PlayStation Pro specs would come a bit too late way after the game’s release. All in all, the PlayStation 4 Pro seemed to have a lot of problems when it first game out.
It wasn’t until around November 2018 when Sony was selling newer models of the PS4 Pro that basically got rid of the fan noise problem. It probably had a better ventilation system or at the very least doesn’t collect dust. We don’t really know, but it seems that the noise problems have lessened. Additionally patches for previous issues such as video not displaying, sound issues and other things were patched out as well. All in all it would seem that PlayStation was able to slightly avert another catastrophe.
The PS Vita was Sony’s handheld console that came out in 2012 with quite a few games and titles for users who want to play games on the go. Well now in 2019, it seems like that the Vita has simply disappeared at least in America with no commercial in sight. We don’t see advertisements for any new games coming out, nor do we see other sorts of advertisements for the Vita these days, so what happened?
Well apparently, games are still being sold and bought in Japan and other countries, but for America it’s just another story. The console was heavily advertised outside of the states, marking the portable console’s success in Japan. In the States however, Sony decided that they didn’t have to advertise for it as we all definitely knew about it, which didn’t catch on if you ask me.
Remember that time when Minecraft basically got the gaming community together through cross-platforming play? On Sept. 30 2017, Minecraft showcased that with the power of cross-platform gaming, players on different consoles would be able to play together. That would make sense and would count for all consoles. So this way the PC, Nintendo Switch, Mobile, and Xbox One players would be playing together. Unfortunately, not everybody is able to enjoy the benefits of Cross-Platform play. In fact, if you were to watch the trailer, it would seem that PS4 was left out of this cross-play business that Minecraft wants to start.
That’s right, the PlayStation which has games that are considered to be cross-platform like Fortnite, Minecraft, Rocket League and other types of fighting games just didn’t want to cross-play. You can say that they were still in the testing stages for Cross-Play usage as PlayStation only recently took the cross-platform feature for their consoles out of beta just in time for Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Maybe they were still in beta and maybe they just didn’t see a reason to officially announce any sort of cross-platform partnership.
While they eventually got cross-play out of Beta, at the time everybody knew PlayStation as the console that didn’t want to get into cross-play and that PlayStation didn’t play well with others. Well at the very least, they were late to the cross-platforming as of last week on October 2. Cross-play got out of Beta for the PlayStation 4 and developers are allowed to utilize this feature for their games. Partially, you can thank Call of Duty Modern Warfare for that as the game heavily sells on their new cross-platform feature.
We all remember the PlayStation 3 and all of the cool games that came out for it right? It had the original Last of Us, the start of the Uncharted Series, Infamous, and a few other cool titles. Well that’s pretty cool, so how much would you pay for it? Well I can probably tell you that you wouldn’t want to pay $499 for a 20 GB of space console, let a lone $599 for a 60 GB Hard Drive. Well that was what Sony wanted to do when they announced their next-gen console. The price was just way too high considering that the Xbox 360 cost only about $299 at most when it first released.
Many speculate that Sony’s ego was way too high at the time after the success from the PS2. Maybe Sony thought that they were worth that much. Well if you consider what the games looked like on the PS3, then you can be assured that the console isn’t worth $599 to play a bunch a games on. If you consider that the original PS4 was $299 on it release in 2014, with the Pro costing $399, then we can safely assume that PlayStation now has their heads on straight and is willing to sell us their consoles at less-than $600.
Back in 2011, the PlayStation Network experienced a security breach between April 17 and April 19 2011 in which PlayStation Services were simply unavailable during the course of 23 days. That’s right, PS3 users had no way of going online for 23 days, basically disrupting the flow of people playing these multiplayer games. Additionally, during the outage it’s been known that 77 million PSN users private information was breached, basically everything about those users was known, forcing many players to make changes to their accounts.
Apparently it was an attack by Anonymous who were upset with Sony’s legal actions agains PS3 jailbreaker George “Geohot” Hotz. Well either way, they were very successful in their revenge against Sony and additionally, this meant that Sony had to pay heavily as the debacle cost the company $171 million. As this is no light matter that happened several years ago, this is known to be one of Sony’s biggest failures that Sony somehow let happen to their customers.
So what do you think about these mistakes that the Sony PlayStation faced in the past years? Do you know of anything else that happened to Sony? Let us know in the comments.
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