The PlayStation 5 launched on the 12th of November 2020. Thanks to the pandemic of the spicy cough-cough, precautions were put in place so people who were lucky enough to pre-order Sony’s powerful and not-so-shiny gaming machine could pick them up without the usual long lines and fanfare that used to come with gaming console launches (You can read more about my experiences with buying the PlayStation 5, along with the Xbox Series X here). Well, almost 2 years later, many Sony fans are still waiting to get their hands on a PlayStation 5… But not me.
I was one of those people who were lucky enough to have been able to both afford a PlayStation 5 at launch, and also get one on launch day. I was excited to get the console home, unbox it, and get playing right away with my copy of Spider-Man: Miles Morales… I did… Then I got to play some other games on the console, mostly review fodder like Resident Evil Village and the like, then it began to just sit there. My wife, a big lover of streaming media, began using my AUD$750 purchase to stream her Netflix movies and shows, followed by us using it to stream shows like The Mandalorian on Disney+. So the PlayStation 5, the reportedly “most powerful console” on the market, began to be used as a glorified streaming machine.
More recently, due to a move of house, the PlayStation 5 sits in the lounge room, connected to the biggest TV in the house… not being used at all. At the moment it’s gathering dust (Though I do clean it with a compressed air gun I got off Amazon) and doing nothing at all. My wife now joins me in the expanded office, streaming Netflix on her laptop, while I either play games on my PC or Xbox Series X which is also in the office.
Sure, I could move the PlayStation 5 into the office, giving it a chance at a new life… But why should I? Well, that’s what the rest of this article will be about. Looking back over the last almost 2 years, why have I moved from a dedicated PlayStation fanatic, who was pumped about the PlayStation 5, to someone who prefers Xbox Series X as his gaming console, and also his PC over one of the more demanded consoles ever… I found those reasons.
1. High Price of games
First of all, I’m used to game prices being high as I live in Australia, the land of the price gouge. We’ve been paying, on average, around $80 to $100 (Australian Dollars) for video games since the Super Nintendo era. That’s what we get when everything, price-wise, is controlled by the US Dollar being used as the central currency in the world and on the stock exchange. However, as I guess is becoming standard in the industry and all others, prices are going up.
Games development isn’t a cheap industry anymore. As the prices of technology have increased, so has the cost of making a video game. What once cost a few hundred thousand, or a couple of million, is pushing tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a game. So at some point, the cost of buying a game had to increase just so the studios could make their development costs back, along with the marketing department, and don’t forget those poor penniless CEOs and management types who get paid millions for sitting on their asses doing nothing.
With that in mind, Sony decided to increase the cost of buying one of their games from $100 to a minimum of $120 to $125 (Australian pricing, not the $60 to $70 price change of the USA pricing) for the standard edition of the game. This, of course, since we are living in the age of microtransaction and the piecemeal release of games, had a flow-on effect on the many special editions that are now flooding the market.
Sony, for a time, negated this increase in cost by allowing owners of select and upcoming PlayStation 4 titles, which were still priced at $100 each, to upgrade their physical copy of the game to the PlayStation 5 version of the game for free, thus more PlayStation 4 copies were being sold than PlayStation 5 copies of the same game. Of course, with this being a multi-billion dollar company that loves profits, this practice has slowly been phased out to the point where you are either buying the PlayStation 5 version directly or being charged $25 (Again, Australian dollars. I know it’s $10 in the USA) to upgrade the game via online.
While Sony is pushing for a more “player pays” system for the PlayStation 5 game price, Microsoft’s Xbox brand instead delivered “Smart Delivery” at no cost to the consumer. Not to mention that the price of Xbox games, no matter if they are Xbox One or Xbox Series X/S games, remain at the same $100 price point since the launch of their console, giving consumers no extra pain to their hip pocket.
(By the way, don’t come at me with “Just shop around” or “Amazon does them cheaper” arguments. I’m speaking from a Recommend Retail Price standpoint here. Shopping around is always cheaper than just paying retail, but it’s about Sony doing things for greed rather than need here.)
2. Bad interface
So once you have the PlayStation 5 all set up and ready to go, you are left with one of the most annoying, semi-complex user interfaces I have seen to date. Where the PlayStation 3 UI was compact and small, it was tidy and organized, easy to use and you could find everything easily… Plus it was customizable to your personal taste with themes you could make and install yourself. The PlayStation 4 got a bit more restrictive, but everything was front and center, with folders that you could use to organize your games to suit your tastes or whatever. Then you have the PlayStation 5 which is a mess.
First of all, we have the interface itself, a single line of recently played games or used applications… Kinda. While you do get those in this single-line interface, do you know what is really front and center? The PlayStation Store. Every single time you boot up the PlayStation 5, you are met with the PlayStation Store. Want to jump right back into the game you were playing last time? Nope! Scroll past the PlayStation Store first because Sony might be able to tempt you with its latest marketing push. That seems to be the focus of the User Interface in general here: To push the PlayStation Store. The center of the screen, while it does show you any game or app you highlight, its first purpose is to sell you stuff. That extra group of icons on the bottom? More advertising for the PlayStation store. Everything on the PlayStation 5 revolves around the PlayStation Store.
Then we have the rest of the interface. If you want to do something like exit a game, check on downloads, turn off the console, change the controller, or whatever. You need to touch the PlayStation icon on the controller and bring up the tiny interface to do those things… With HUGE advertising for your achievements, news and store options also pop up and get the most screen space. If you want folders… HA! No chance. Sony says they are coming, but almost 2 years later it’s “still in development”. Not to mention that you will be constantly hunting down the way to delete screenshots and videos that you accidentally take thanks to the horrible button layout on the controller, but the option is hidden in the setting, which itself is hidden away too. Almost everything except shopping is done to be anti-consumer with the PlayStation 5.
Now a lot of these things I was able to get around and memorize, however, my wife (Who is just beginning her journey into gaming) has so much trouble finding anything on the PlayStation 5 including getting to the media menu so she can access Netflix. Sony doesn’t seem to understand that consumers want an easy-to-navigate interface and not being shoved into the PlayStation Store every time they do something else on the console… Plus bring back music storage and integration into games! Even the Xbox interface is less intrusive and more user-friendly than PlayStation5 is.
3. PlayStation Plus Redesign
Oh PlayStation Plus, what was once the paragon of giving the players something extra for the $80 a year they would spend just to access your online services and servers is now one gigantic rip-off with no real value at all.
PlayStation Plus, Sony’s answer to Xbox Live Gold, was THE place to go for some amazing “free” games that you could fill your library up with and have many years’ worth of content to play. Back in the PlayStation 3 era when it was introduced, PlayStation Plus would give you 2 games a month with the approximate value of $50-ish, with a lot of those titles being top-level AAA-developed titles sprinkled in with some great indie-developed games. This would continue in the PlayStation 4 era, with some of the games that would come out exclusively (At first) through the PlayStation Plus system getting some major boosts in downloads. Remember Rocket League? That started as a PlayStation Plus exclusive game, now it’s worth millions in downloads and add-ons, making its developer, Psyonix, into a household name.
Even at the beginning of the PlayStation 5 era, things were still good for the service. The games per month increased to 3, with one game per month being a PlayStation 5 game, sometimes getting exclusive Day 1 releases like Oddworld: Soulstorm. PlayStation 5 owners also got the PlayStation Plus Collection: A group of 20 PlayStation 4 Best Sellers that could be used to boost your online collection of games so you would have something to play on your PlayStation 5 no matter what… Then things began to change.
Sony announced that they were going to overhaul the PlayStation Plus service, making it a “we’re not competing with, but we really are” Xbox Game Pass style system, giving “more value” to PlayStation 4 & PlayStation 5 owners (At an extra cost, of course) with a huge library of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 titles (Rotating in and out, just like Game Pass) and even a much-requested feature: Backwards Compatibility (More like emulation, and some platforms and titles not available outside of the USA). Sure, this sounds good on the surface, but the prices were much too high from the outset, and the highest tier which is meant to give you PlayStation 3 game streaming (Unavailable outside of the USA) and PlayStation 1 & PlayStation 2 emulation only seems to be a few sprinklings of games from those by-gone eras; a return of Sony’s “we hate the past” mentality.
Now for me, since I’ve got a few years of game reviewing under my belt along with a lot of waiting and shopping around, has produced a very large and expansive library of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 titles, making Sony’s perfect PlayStation Plus Extra tier completely pointless to me, and the PlayStation Plus Premium tier is such a joke (See above paragraph) that I decided to keep the PlayStation Plus Essential tier (The original PlayStation Plus) till my subscription ends… However, Sony seems to now want to change that too. Since they want people on the Extra or Premium tiers, the offerings through Essential are starting to dry up with AAA-level games becoming less and less available on the service.
Well, the joke is on you Sony, since I’m going to not bother with your service at all in March 2023 (when my current subscription ends). For the first time since PlayStation Plus was announced with the PlayStation 3, I’m ending the service, content that the games I actually own are more than enough for me to play on my PlayStation 5 going forward… If I ever do play it again. As for the Premium tier… Well, I already have a solution for that.
4. Price Increases & The Lack of Supply
This one is a more recent one and something that isn’t really about my experience with the PlayStation 5, but those who are unable to get their hands on one yet.
Recently, PlayStation’s president and CEO, Jim Ryan, stated that the cost of the PlayStation 5 was going to increase internationally, stating it was a “necessity given the current global economic environment and its impact on SIE’s business”. Sure, I could understand this. The world is currently finding it hard to recover after the effects of the worldwide spicy Cough-cough pandemic, plus there was already an issue with components used in the creation of gaming consoles, as well as graphics cards for PC, starting to run low thus increasing production costs. No company can absorb those types of things forever.
However, as pointed out in one of our articles recently, Sony has been on a buying spree of developers in the gaming space including Bungie, the developers of Destiny, and Savage Game Studios. Not to mention their non-gaming purchases like the Anime streaming service Crunchyroll, and other acquisitions since November 2020. So Sony is telling us, the consumers, that they cannot absorb the costs of manufacturing PlayStation 5 consoles anymore and need to increase prices? Yeah right. This is some straight-up lying bullshit. I’d also go into how this is an American decision biased towards Americans, but I’ve got a whole section below dedicated to that nonsense.
So this price increase. When announced, it was only going to be a $50 increase for Australians, taking the cost of a PlayStation 5 disc console from $750 to $800, and a Discless console from $600 to $650. Do you think that’s what happened? Nope! As many of you have eyes and would have seen the image above, the current cost of a PlayStation 5 console is $895 for a disc version and $759 for a diskless version. Now you could argue that the $895 price point is due to including a copy of Horizon: Forbidden West with the console, but that game is worth about $20 these days, and it’s a Sony-produced game, so they are counting that as a less-leader product to get you to buy the console. It’s easier for Sony to lose $20 on one game when they are making an extra $145 on that version of the console and $159 on the other. No this isn’t due to exchange rates, but once again, America screwing over the world because it needs to make money.
I feel so sorry for all the people who pre-ordered PlayStation 5 units before or once the price increase happened, as they are having to pay more at a time when it’s getting harder to buy food, pay the bills, put petrol (or gas as you Americans say) into your car to go to work in a job where wages haven’t kept up with the cost of inflation for the past 12 years. Sony seems intent on making the world pay so that those in America (Much like Hollywood only cares about US Box Office numbers when internationally some movies do way better outside of the country) won’t have to.
5. Where are the games?
As of the time of writing, we just had a PlayStation “State of Play” event and a Nintendo Direct event on the same day, both videos detailed upcoming games for both company’s mainline systems: PlayStation 5 for Sony, and Nintendo Switch for Nintendo (duh). After watching both videos, it was shocking how day and night things were with both companies, with Nintendo showing off a TON of games that are releasing now, soon, and in 2023… While Sony… Showed off a lot of stuff coming out sometime in the next unknown timeframe.
Nintendo showed off things like a new Zelda title, a new Fire Emblem, Pikmin 4, Octopath Traveler 2; remasters/ports of Kirby, It Takes Two, Fatal Frame 4, Resident Evil 2 & 3 remakes, Resident Evil VII, Resident Evil Village, Sifu; DLC for Mario Kart 8, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Switch Sports; Mario Party 1-3 on Nintendo 64, and FUCKING GOLDENEYE!! Not to mention about 10+ other games that I haven’t even mentioned, not including the updates on Bayonetta 3 that they showed as well. Just about everything Nintendo showed had either a release date, a demo, or something that got people excited about owning a Nintendo Switch.
Sony (or PlayStation) on the other hand… Not as exciting.
The much shorter State of Play featured a surprise opening with Tekken 8 being shown (Not that it looks any different from Tekken 7, but it’s still in development), a Story trailer for God of War: Ragnarok along with the announcement of a special edition controller for the game, some PSVR2 games which look boring and uninteresting unless you own a PSVR2 (which I do not), Like A Dragon: Ishin was announced, more crap for Hogwarts Legacy, a couple of new experimental action games, and PlayStation Stars: A crappy digital collector thing that will mean nothing in the long run.
Out of all the offerings PlayStation put up for State of Play, only Tekken 8 and Like A Dragon: Ishin were getting my attention. Tekken 8 only because I’m curious to see where the Mishima storyline will go after Tekken 7, and I enjoyed Yakuza: Like A Dragon (on my Xbox) but this next game looks to have gone back to a more traditional Yakuza action game style which I’m not a fan of. The three experimental action games (Synduality, Stellar Blade, and Rise of the Ronin) also seem like things I already passed on like Nier: Automata and any Samurai game in the past 15 years. I’m not hyped for God of War: Ragnarok because I’m still very very slowly making my way through God of War, which keeps putting me to sleep (BOI!!), so I’m in no rush to buy the next one.
Then there is the PlayStation Stars thing… A program where you earn points (Like Xbox Achievement points?) that you trade for digital collectibles featuring game characters and other PlayStation products… Yay? I’m sorry, but things like digital collectibles and NFTs are just completely pointless and do nothing but trick you into doing more for nothing. If you could trade the points in for something like 10% off a game on the PlayStation store, or a month of PlayStation Plus, then the system would be worth checking out. But as it stands, it’s just another Sony marketing ploy to “reward” the players which taking more money from their wallets.
Overall, between the two offerings, Nintendo showed that they have more in production, and understand their market base better than Sony does. Nintendo offered something for all age groups, marketing demographics, and just the players in general; not to mention, they actually seem to want to support their online and retro markets more now that they are paying for the service than Sony seems to.
6. Hard drive size (and cost of excess drives)
With bigger and more powerful consoles comes bigger install sizes. While it is easy to get and use hard drives in older consoles (PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 had easy to swap and upgrade hard drives) it has become more expensive and a lot of hassle in order to get expanded storage for the PlayStation 5 and even the Xbox Series X/S. Yep, in this part, no one wins.
Where we once were using mechanical, Solid State, or Hybrid hard drives for our consoles, we are now being forced to use the newer and much more expensive M.2 drives. A standard PlayStation 5 console comes with an 875Gb onboard storage drive, which loses around 210Gb for the operating system and all that backend stuff, leaving you with about 660Gb to install games, and with a lot of higher-end games like Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption 2 installing at 100Gb or more each, that’s not many games on a console these days.
Sure, you can get an external hard drive, but those can only archive PlayStation 5 games, not play them (Though you can store and play PlayStation 4 games from an external hard drive with no issues); and unlike the old days, you cannot simply open up the console and upgrade the storage to something larger since the internal storage is a flash chip on the motherboard (Also something that causes a lot of failures in PlayStation 5 consoles… See above complaints). The only option to upgrade the PlayStation 5 storage so you can install and play more PlayStation 5 games is to buy a 4.0/Gen 4 series M.2 NVMe drive and install that… But have you seen the prices on those?
Buying an M.2 drive is an easy thing to do, as they are almost standard in every PC build these days, but those are mostly 500Gb drives used for the Operating System only with other SSD drives picking up the slack for programs and games. You can’t do that with a PlayStation 5. Instead, you’re going to need, at minimum, a 2Tb or larger M.2 drive, which as you can see above, is an easy $300+, with 4Tb drives costing more than the cost of the PlayStation 5. Then you have to install the drive (Make sure it has an attached cooler on the drive as Sony’s PlayStation 5 design does NOTHING for cooling the drive at all), which involves opening up the side plate of the console, finding the M.2 drive slot, screwing the drive into place, and return the covering. Sounds simple, but so many people have failed to do this properly to the point it’s killed consoles.
Xbox isn’t much better, with their version being very specific in shape, limited to 1Tb only, and costing around $300. However, unlike Sony, all you have to do is plug the drive into the back of the Xbox Series X console and it’s installed. No need to open anything up or need to know how to not shock the system while installing it; just plug and play.
Speaking of storage, we have an SSD buyers guide it you still want or need to expand your PlayStation 5’s storage.
7. Sony doesn’t care about “The Players”, just their wallets
Throwing this one in here for a fellow Outerhaven writer, and all the other people who have ever had to deal with Sony’s “help” department either in the USA or anywhere else in the world.
Have you ever tried to do something like getting a refund on a bad or faulty game? Had your account been hacked? Or have you needed to send your expensive console in for repair? Well, Sony says that they want to help you out, making it easy to get ahold of someone who can give you advice or do what you request within moments… Not! Sony doesn’t care about you or even their own products once you have finished paying their increased prices for games or consoles.
Upon launch, there were whole batches of PlayStation 5 units that would often break down, the major problem being that the HDMI port on the system would malfunction or fry itself completely. Did Sony do a product recall or issue a notice about this? Nope. Did they offer refunds or even free replacement of the faulty HDMI ports? Nope! If you were one of many people who would suffer from this issue, then Sony wouldn’t help you… Unless you paid upwards of $200+ (without shipping and handling, which you had to pay extra for) for them to repair your console, stating that they are not responsible and that it must be consumers mishandling the consoles instead. This is why you will see many console repair/mod channels on YouTube has many videos of them buying broken PlayStation 5 consoles and fixing them, complete with “How To” guides if you are also able to do such things at home. (This is extra problematic for Sony in Australia as we have the “Australian Consumer Law” which, under the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, demands companies either replace or repair faulty products for free. Something Sony has fought against a few times here)
Ever picked up a game that won’t install properly, or bought a digital game that wasn’t as advertised? Well, that also seems to fall outside Sony’s dedication to its consumers. Remember how there was such a fuss about Cyberpunk 2077 and the horrible state the game was in for both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 users? It was so bad that retail stores offered refunds for the game, Xbox owners could refund the game, and Steam owners could refund the game, all at the push of a button (OMG Xbox’s refund system is so good)… But Sony? Nah! You bought it, you own it, not our problem if the game is unplayable. It took Government agencies (Or in Australia’s case, the Australian Consumer Law) to push Sony to not only offer refunds for Cyberpunk 2077 but also remove the game from sale till it was in a playable state… Also a year later.
Therein lies the issue with Sony’s system, they only want to take your money, and not give you anything where you can get a refund, repair, or anything related to keeping your console and gameplay experience worthy of the money you spent. While other big game distribution services like Xbox Store or Steam have refund services in place (With conditions) that are easy to use and very consumer friendly. By the way, Nintendo (at least in Australia) offers free repair services on their consoles within reason.
But this practice isn’t just reserved for the consumer, oh no, it’s also with publication too. In the UK (notice, once again, that this is an international issue, not an American one), Sony is being sued for its 30% cut of all games purchased on the PlayStation Store, a practice that all the services do, but Sony keeps tight control over the pricing of games on their platform, other not allowing publishers to reduce prices due to their cut remaining at all times. The same type of thing happens here in Australia, with Sony keeping their retail price point on games for decades before reducing prices long after the physical games are long gone from store shelves. On a not-so-surprising side note: US Lawyers tried to sue Sony for this anti-competition behavior, but it was thrown out by US Courts.
You thought I forgot about the last thing. If your account gets stolen by hackers, then Sony won’t help you. Today, one of our staff here at The Outerhaven had their account hacked, with the email associated with the account being changed to something else, thus they have lost all their purchases from the PlayStation Store. While Sony did send out the following email:
This email confirms that the sign-in ID (e-mail address) for your account has been changed.
If you did not intend to change your sign-in ID, contact Consumer Services for further assistance:
https://www.playstation.com/support
When our staff member contacted Sony through their online help portal, only to be met with “Due to security, we cannot help you at this time”, then the online chat service was terminated on the spot. It seems that for a company that is all about security and protection, they don’t want to help someone who has had their account, and their private information breached. While this issue is still ongoing, with our staff member having to find time (During work hours obvious) to contact Sony by phone to get their account back, it seems like there is more hassle ahead for something that Sony should (and already offered) help with but won’t.
8. The Sony of Japan Issue…
Sony is, at its core, a Japanese company. Thus Sony is at the whims of the Japanese culture and management style, which, thanks to the worldwide pandemic, is undergoing a very “Japan for Japanese only” mentality at the moment. The threat and still highly uncontained nature of the spicy cough-cough has caused borders to close to just about anyone who isn’t born in Japan, this includes international workers who haven’t had their working visas renewed or their work contracts renewed. This has created a very “Japan-centric” mentality to be created, and with most of the developers Sony has contracts with being Japanese in the first place, there are a lot more Japanese focussed games (meaning focused on gameplay styles that appeal to Japanese gamers, not games set in Japan) coming to the PlayStation 5 in the future. Going back to the recent State of Play, only God of War: Ragnarok, Star Wars VR, and Hogwarts Legacy are produced in America, with the rest being Japanese-made, and then that’s it for now.
This isn’t the first time that Sony or other Japanese companies have had this Japan-centric mindset either. Nintendo does this all the time, as do companies like CAPCOM, Namco-Bandai, Konami, and more. These companies tend to get very segregated from the rest of the world, with their management being Japanese, are taught that Western consumers are all Call of Duty diehards who prefer “shoot-shoot bang bang” to an RPG or something of that style, so they make those games specifically with the Japanese market in mind. This mindset often leads to issues with the American or other international sides of the company, with those CEOs usually butting heads about things like content, marketing, and price
While there are a lot of games coming from the American and international side of things, it looks like the two biggest sides of Sony, Sony Interactive Entertainment (Japan) and PlayStation of America (America, duh) seem to be making a lot of decisions for the PlayStation brand that the other would not like, possibly without the other side noticing either due to radio silence.
9. The Sony of America Issue…
On the other side of the Sony coin is PlayStation of America, which handles pretty much all of the Western sides of the Sony PlayStation business. At its head is CEO Jim Ryan, a man who seems to not give a shit about the PlayStation consumer base at all, and just wants to play catch-up to Microsoft and Xbox. Jim Ryan is a numbers man, something I hate with management people. Numbers men do nothing but sit there all day and look at numbers. If the positive style numbers are up, then that’s where they want to push the company, when negative numbers are up, then they pass the blame to other people or departments. Most of the time these people are selfish jackasses who only focus on one market, which is what Jim Ryan is doing.
Jim Ryan got promoted to CEO of PlayStation of America back in 2019, just as Sony was getting ready to push the PlayStation 5 out to the market. One of the first things Jim said about a much-requested feature: Backwards compatibility was “I was at a Gran Turismo event recently where they had PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS4 games, and the PS1 and PS2 games, they looked ancient. Like, why would anybody play this?”. This showed Jim’s intentions right from the get-go: Fuck the consumer’s wants, I know what they want.
While Jim Ryan has been a part of Sony for over 25 years, he was mostly in the UK division of the company, which doesn’t amount to much at all. He was just a management guy there, doing management things like getting games produced, signing contracts, etc. Now that he has the keys to the kingdom that is Sony Computer Entertainment (only reporting to the overall Sony Company CEO directly), he has done nothing but push for higher prices, higher percentage cuts, and do anything to grow PlayStation’s market share in the console market. While this is great on a business front, consumer wise Jim Ryan has done nothing but push predatory, anti-consumer, price gouging, and complete rip-off schemes; to the point where people want him removed from the role.
The best examples of Jim Ryan’s handiwork are seen above: the PlayStation Plus tier system, with the highest tier, actually worth less than the other two, the user interface of the PlayStation 5 focusing on the PlayStation Store and pushing product, and the recent international price increase of the PlayStation 5 console overall. I am ashamed to have bought something that gives this man credit and adds to whatever stupidly high bonus he will get with milestone achievements the PlayStation 5 sales numbers reach.
10. Lack of use
The final reason why I regret buying a PlayStation 5 is that it just sits there doing nothing. As you can see in the picture above (Ignore the random clutter, we just moved house) my PlayStation 5 is just sitting next to my main lounge room TV doing nothing. It has been like this since we moved house almost a month ago, and it was doing the same thing for the last 6-12 months, with my wife being the main user in the warmer months when she would spend more time using it to watch Netflix than I would be playing video games.
If there is one thing I hate doing, it’s wasting money. The then $750 I paid for this white monolith (Side note: Why white? Why not black like the PlayStation 2, 3, or 4?) could have gone onto half a month’s rent, stocked up the fridge and freezer for the next 6 months, or paid for something I use a lot more: PC upgrades or even some retro consoles and games. Instead, every time I walk past the thing I shake my head and just feel sad that I’m spending more gaming time on my PC, which has cheaper games of the same quality, or in the office playing the Xbox Series X. At the same time, I feel like I should go out there and at least turn it on to make sure it still works, but that feels like a self-defeating prophecy.
At the end of it all, I do own a PlayStation 5, and it does come in handy sometimes when I get something to review on it. But I’ve found that I just don’t enjoy using the PlayStation 5 as much as I did the previous generations. A big possibility is that since I’m in a position to own all 3 major gaming consoles at once, I see that games-wise, Xbox just does things better and is better value. Games on the digital service are on sale more often, the delivery of products is easy, I can access easy-to-use help from the company, and the experience is just as good if not better than PlayStation 5 when it comes to the user interface. If I need something to play on the go, I have the Switch there ready to go.
Sorry Sony, but where you once were great, you are now just so pathetic that you deserve nothing but the shake of the head in shame…
(Don’t contact me asking to buy my PlayStation 5, I’m not selling.)
