It's not an exaggeration to say Sony's winning the current console war against Microsoft. The PlayStation 5 is comfortably outselling the Xbox Series X/S. But yet, despite being the market leader, Sony's made some own goals of late, and a former lead from its green-tinted rival is calling them out.
In a new video on her YouTube channel titled 'Sony Please Stop Hitting Yourself! Why Quiet Changes Backfire', Laura Fryer, previously an executive producer at Microsoft Games Studios, looks at recent underhanded messaging from the home of The Last of Us and God of War. She highlights the decision to force an online check-in for games bought digitally from the end of March this year, within 30 days of purchase. You simply need to play it once with an internet connection for the license to be sorted, but slightly obtuse messaging had people wondering if this was making their library online-only.
"Sony didn't clearly communicate it or announce it up front," she says. "Many players saw a scary 30-day timer warning on their games and they panicked. They naturally started thinking Sony was going to start taking away the games they paid for or force constant instant."
Eventually, Sony clarified this was to curb refund scams and that it's actually a simple, one-off requirement, but now people are more wary. Fryer falls back on a theme of her commentary on the industry: trust is hard to earn and easy to lose, and Sony's damaged the bond it has with its audience.
She then moves onto the Helldivers 2 debacle, wherein the sci-fi shooter needed a PSN account to play on PC. Muddled messaging and not all territories having the same access eventually led to the requirement being rolled back.
"When you do something that burns trust, it puts a flag on you," Fryer explains. "People look at you differently. They get burned once and they realize that you're not automatically trustworthy, and this ends up amplifying everything you do."
She ends on a plea: "I long for the Sony that made the right call and did the right thing when Xbox was pushing their online DRM mess. Go back to being that Sony, the one that felt like they were on our side."
It's worth noting PlayStation apparently didn't mean to come across so condescending to Xbox with its tongue-in-cheek guide to sharing PS4 games back in 2014. Regardless, that feels like a very different era of the console compared to now.
