Since the VGC staff have decided to weigh in in an official capacity with a pair of articles posted last night and this morning to main page, I thought it worth briefly speaking to their essence here (where I can't get down-voted). These two articles are:
Indies Criticize PlayStation Over Charges, Policies, and More
Housemarquee Wants to Develop Bigger and More Ambitious Games Since It Is Now Part of PlayStation
I'm sure the decision to post these two articles back-to-back immediately following on the conclusion of this discussion here was just a coincidence and that the first article wasn't intended as a swipe at me, especially considering that, unlike the other one, you'll notice how the first of those two links cites no accompanying article as its source, and was thus implicitly crafted by the VGC staff themselves (i.e. you might say a passion project) by rounding up random posts on social media that fit their preferred narrative. The second, "balancing" one, posted to assure the perception of official neutrality, by contrast, is a lazy, standard-issue copy/paste of an external news article from more credible sources like most stuff posted to the main page seems to be. 
Would either of these be there had this discussion thread never been posted? No. Probably not. Therefore, before posting my own opinions on the contents of these two articles, I think it may be worth pointing out that these developments do reflect on ongoing, transparent brand bias VGC clearly possesses against Sony in particular for whatever reason.
The bias I reference is clearly reflected in most first-party game reviews we have seen on VGC wherein the scoring of games published by Nintendo closely resembles said game's average score on Metacritic while most games published by Sony are scored significantly below their MC averages on a regular basis anymore (examples from recent years that immediately come to mind have included Death Stranding, The Last of Us Part II, Ghost of Tsushima, Astro's Playroom, and Returnal, although the occasional glowing review is posted to establish plausible deniability of this larger picture). Whatever you think of Jim Ryan, it's no excuse to diminish these games systematically. Whether Jim Ryan was involved in any of these projects or not, it seems that there is one institution that, in the eyes of the staff here, can do nothing right.
Now that I have reviewed the motives behind these developments (because they're transparent and annoying), which is that I have said something good about Sony at some point here and must therefore be discredited in an official capacity, let's get to the substance:
I agree.
That is to say that I agree with the crux of both linked articles. On the one hand, Sony has clearly crafted the PlayStation 5 to appeal to "hardcore gamers", as they have said all along, their institutional definition of which doesn't seem to per se include those of us who tend to love newer and smaller developers more than entrenched powerhouses with established AAA-scale budgets for every one of their games. Their previous platform having been nicknamed "the IndieStation", this seems as a new attitude toward smaller developers that has developed in response to the Switch taking most of that market away from them, which they had previously dominated. Now that the Switch dominates the indie games market, those of us who loves those games are "casual" gamers, apparently. Or at least not worth the effort anyway.
Anyway, on the other hand, that's (obviously) not what I like about today's Sony. My motives for buying PlayStation 5 were (perhaps ironically) similar to people's traditional motives for buying Nintendo systems: the first-party library, which I still feel that, overall, is second-to-none when it comes to offerings on the AAA landscape and that it's in no small part because of their willingness to take risks supporting games like Returnal and Death Stranding and yes TLOU2 and so on. Maybe that reflects a certain bias on my part in favor of material that's relatively thematically adult, which might explain why I find these sorts of projects more compelling than Arms or Ring Fit Adventure or Splatoon (which I think is a fair argument that some have made here on this thread and an overall personal bias reflected in the fact that Metroid is by far my favorite Nintendo franchise), but nonetheless I feel that there is more legitimate risk involved when you take those risks with the core gaming market of grown adults who play games for our own purposes more than for social purposes rather than with the family "expansion market", if you will, that you don't even need to succeed. But maybe that's just me.
There. I have said it.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 01 July 2021
