Multiple industry insiders have reported that Sony was holding back with the latest edition of its PlayStation Showcase. Their claims emerged online following a mixed response to the event which saw the gameplay reveal of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, but was criticized for otherwise lacking in first-party exclusives, among other things.
With the last PlayStation Showcase happening nearly two years ago, the fandom had high expectations for Sony's May 24 broadcast. And though the event was hardly lacking in content, clocking in at over an hour, it offered little in the way of release dates and was largely focused on CGI trailers instead of gameplay sequences that many have been hoping for. Some fans were also surprised to later learn just how many PlayStation Showcase games are coming to Xbox.
Established industry insider Tom Henderson subsequently took online to suggest that Sony has been holding back with the PlayStation Showcase. Many of the titles from the event "are pretty much ready," even though they are yet to be treated to gameplay reveals and release dates, Henderson reported on May 25. Soon thereafter, another known leaker known as The Snitch said they were surprised to see Sony choosing to omit several AAA games that are on the horizon from its PlayStation Showcase lineup.
Elaborating on that claim, The Snitch stated that another PlayStation PC port is currently slated to release in July, adding that it's "super weird" this game wasn't present at the May 24 event. Broadly speaking, the notion that a major publisher would hold back on announcing near-finished products isn't outside the realm of possibility. This was recently underlined by widespread reports that Nintendo has been sitting on Metroid Prime Remastered for years, with Fire Emblem Engage supposedly receiving similar treatment. Yet such a strategy is far from standard practice for Sony, who historically preferred longer marketing cycles.
The overall lack of new release dates announced during the latest PlayStation Showcase is another reason to doubt the claims that many of the games seen at the event are close to going gold. One counterpoint is that Naughty Dog already promised more information about The Last of Us multiplayer spinoff sometime in 2023; seeing how that game was nowhere to be seen during the May 24 broadcast, another PlayStation Showcase or at the very least a State of Play stream could still emerge in the second half of 2023.
But the window for that to realistically happen is pretty narrow, because publishers tend to focus on pushing their existing inventories in the run-up to the holiday season, traditionally the most lucrative period of the year for the video game industry. That notwithstanding, with multiple AAA PlayStation exclusives like Death Stranding 2 and The Last of Us multiplayer game being expected to emerge in the near future, Sony has to fit those reveals somewhere.
Source: Insider Gaming