Yeah, I’m still on the Sony hate train. I’ll admit that right now so that there’s no confusion about where this is coming from. Like a lot of gamers who’ve mainly played on PlayStation over the past decade or so, I’ve been feeling increasingly betrayed by Sony as the years go on and their anti-consumer decisions pile up. Frankly, the announcements last week were more akin to a last straw for me than anything else, and now it feels like everything I’m reading is just adding more fuel to my rage as a gaming consumer.

Something that should probably be addressed first is the fact that, yes, Sony is not your friend. It’s a giant megacorp and therefore should be trusted just as much as companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, Disney, Meta, Nvidia and so on. That is, none of us should be affording them any sort of trust whatsoever and therefore “betrayal” isn’t exactly what we should be feeling here. The relationship is the same as it ever was: company vs consumer. It’s just that Sony, like most companies now, is doing everything it can to milk every last drop of value out of its consumers.

All that said, it’s still been extremely frustrating to watch the value we enjoyed for a very long time as PlayStation players get rapidly eroded over the past six years, with this year already shaping up to be the most egregious yet. 

Sony has tried to kill shops on its older platforms to drive players to the PS5. It raised the price of PS Plus and stratified it. It’s raised the price of the PS5 twice so that it now sits at $650 rather than the $500 it started at; It’s prioritized live service games while barely trickling out the single player experiences the brand used to be known for, and most of those have just been “okay” and not worth the price of admission. 

It’s done its best to shove PS Plus down everyone’s throats to even the detriment of its own games, and it’ll shortly kill both the PS3/ PS Vita stores in the same fell swoop. Oh, and their TOS says they can delete your account with all its purchases if they decide it’s been inactive for too long.

You’d think that’d be enough, right? You’d think they’d cool it, especially with practically the whole internet calling them out for these very nakedly greedy moves, and getting sued by several European entities, but no. Nope. 

Not only has the company done nothing to address the outrage it’s caused, but it’s still doing its darndest to cram PS Plus and other obnoxious accounts and subscriptions where they’re absolutely not needed.

See, it’s just come out that split-screen co-op in Halo: Campaign Evolved (still a dumb name btw) will require both players to have PS Plus AND a Microsoft account linked to those PS Plus accounts. Not for online (though you apparently get that as a “bonus” for this nonsense), but simply to play with a friend on the same screen. Wow.

Sure, this one is just as much Microsoft’s fault (and believe me, they’re on the list too), but Sony is still complicit in this requirement. With this system, there’s no just inviting a buddy over to play split-screen just like back in the Halo golden years.

Heck, there’s not even any offline co-op play here since those accounts almost certainly have to get verified by some stupid server sitting in one of those monstrous data centers they’re forcing in everywhere they can these days. This is where we are now. 

Split-screen co-op, once a staple feature of offline friendly fun, now effectively sits behind an internet requirement and at least one subscription paywall. It’s absolutely disgusting and we need to stop supporting it even indirectly.

Like I said in my post last week, I’m now at the point where not only do I want off PlayStation as soon as humanly possible, but I now regret that I stuck with it past the PS4 days. The only thing keeping me tied to it right now is one friend from back home that I regularly play online with. But we’ve got options for that. We don’t have to stay on PS Plus in order to chat and hang out. 

So, once 2027 rolls around, maybe (probably) Sony will be down another two subscribers. It really sucks that my stuff could wind up getting deleted, but I’m not buying from them anymore. I’m done. Sony has no respect for me, it has no respect for you, nor even for its player base as a whole. We’re all collectively just a resource to be exploited as far as Sony is concerned, and it’s time we all stop letting them do so.

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Yeah, it got a little ranty this week, but, what can I say? I’m still mad. It’s as if these last couple of weeks put all of this nasty behavior from Sony into perspective, and what I’m seeing in it now is absolutely infuriating. But where do you stand on all this? What’s your take?

Image by Flickr user Fe Ilya (CC BY-SA 2.0)