Q&A: JIM RYAN
You’re coming into this generation with a head start. Are you confident you can sustain that lead, and how do you plan to achieve that – inasmuch as you can plan ahead given the pandemic?
We tend to benchmark ourselves more against our own internal objectives in terms of maintaining a lead, increasing a lead or protecting a lead. For the second part of your question, I’d speak to the fact that we’ve painstakingly built this very large and rich PS4 community. One one of the things we’ve seen this year is that more of them are more engaged with their PS4s than ever before. I think – to the extent that we can be successful in transitioning that community from PS4 to PS5, at a scale and pace greater than we’ve ever had them make that transition – that’s where the opportunity lies. All history tells us that in the first year or so, 75% – give or take – of those who buy a next-generation console will be upgraders from the previous generation. When you’ve got such a large and fertile and ritually engaged base as we do, that opportunity is a very sizable one for us.
Obviously Covid has made a difference to your plans, but has your strategy changed at all in light of Microsoft’s approach?
It hasn’t really changed us at a strategy level, but it really has affected our execution and our tactics. On the second part of the question: no, we fixed on our product lineup late last year. Our preferred pricing was determined early in this calendar year, prelockdown. And we just got on and executed with what we wanted to do.
This ‘preferred price’ didn’t change at all from your original plan?
[Flatly] No. No, no, it didn’t, no. We’ve been able to launch PlayStation 5 at $399, ¤399, with all the horsepower and the feature set that the console has, at the same price that we launched PS4 back in 2013. That was important for us, and we’re very happy that we’ve been able to do that. 399 worked very well for us last time round and we’d like it to work very well for us this time round, too.
The next-gen difference in a lot of games isn’t so much about visuals as speed and convenience – and in the case of the DualSense, it’s very much a case of feeling is believing. How do you communicate that to players, particularly during a pandemic? This is an area where Covid has complicated our world. Because we would have had hundreds of thousands of gamers able to witness for themselves the elimination of the friction point that has always existed in console gaming – which is the time it takes to load a game. Having that go away is great. Had we been able to have people sample the DualSense controller over the course of the summer and the autumn, the word of mouth would have been a lot further advanced. But we just have to roll our sleeves up and get on with it and we’re going to have a great launch even absent being able to do that. I think that word of mouth that is so important for something like this – because you’re right, you have to try it or hear about it firsthand from somebody that you know and trust – will start. And what we’ve all seen over so many years with videogames is that word of mouth can be incredibly powerful.
Is the launch lineup an accurate reflection of what players can expect from PS5 in the years to come?
If you go back and compare it with our history, it’s easily the biggest and best
“ALL HISTORY TELLS US THAT IN THE FIRST YEAR OR SO, 75% – GIVE OR TAKE – OF THOSE WHO BUY A NEXT-GENERATION CONSOLE WILL BE UPGRADERS”
firstparty lineup that we’ve ever had, and the support from third parties is greater than we’ve ever had. And the other thing I’d say is that the 2021 lineup is likewise of a different level than we’ve ever seen before. People rightly point back to our firstparty Worldwide Studios games as being one of the defining things about the PS4 generation. But often less remarked upon is the fact that the really great firstparty games came in the second part of the cycle. And we will have games of that quality, but we’re going to have them earlier in the cycle this time around.
Some would argue game price increases are overdue, but £70 is still a lot of money. Does your approach to making games change at all, in terms of trying to justify the higher RRP?
No, we just set out to make the games as best we can. And once the games are made, then we’ll consider what the right price to sell them at is. We don’t start out with a price in mind, and then tailor the game to the price point. At launch, we do have a range of prices. And that will rightly and properly continue as we progress through the cycle.
Does that mean more variation in the types of games you produce? You’ve got Miles Morales at launch – will we see more standalone expansions like that?
I think you’re actually going to see some interesting variations from Worldwide Studios over the course of this cycle. With the PS4, we saw Uncharted: Lost Legacy, for example, published in the middle of the cycle, and that worked really well at that point in time. That model can work really well. And our studios are working on all sorts of things right now.
Obviously you still have a large userbase to cater to on PS4, but some will be concerned that that’s holding developers back from really making the most of the hardware. How do you balance those two things?
As I said, we’ve built this huge PS4 community, and again they’re engaged with their PS4s very happily in a way never really seen at this point in any generation. We do feel that we have a responsibility to that very large community, and an opportunity to carry on making great PS4 games for as long as the need is there. And I think that is the right thing to do, it’s the rational thing to do, and I think you will see a tail with PS4 that you did not see with PS3. But that said, as time passes, you’re going to see more and more emphasis on PS5 development and the PS5 SKU will be the lead SKU. And again, that is only a logical and rational path for any developer and any publisher to go down.
There have been suggestions of a conscious shift away from the Japanese market, not least with switching the circle and X buttons after 25 years to bring the interface in line with the west. What’s your position on that?
The Sony stance is that the Japanese market remains incredibly important to us. We have not been as excited about the engagement of the Japanese game development community as we are now for many years. There was a time, perhaps around about ten years ago, when – and this reflected the tastes in the Japanese market at the time – the Japanese developers and publishers became primarily focused on mobile gaming. But around 2015 they came back to console and to PlayStation. And we saw in the second half of the PS4 cycle a greater level of engagement from those Japanese publishers. That continues and strengthens yet again with PS5.
In our two launch shows – which featured a reasonable number of games, but not a huge number of games – there were eight Japanesedeveloped titles there, many of which are the subject of collaboration and partnership between PlayStation and the Japanese publishing community. I’d also observe that we’re making a statement by launching in Japan day and date with the US, and that is not what we did with PS4. So I read that stuff. A lot of that commentary is inaccurate, and Japan – as our second largest market and as Sony’s heartland – continues to be really important to us.
The DualSense feels like a quality piece of kit – and at £59.99, a very reasonable price when you consider the cost of a pair of JoyCons, an extra controller isn’t going to break the bank. But then the whole PS5 experience has a premium feel from the moment you turn it on. It’s certainly a step forward from PS4’s rather characterless start-up, evoking comparisons with the way PS3 greeted you with the sound of an orchestra tuning up. Here, instead, you’re welcomed by soothing washes of ambient sound, as two giant blue circles shrink almost instantaneously into twinkling motes of light that quickly scatter like fireflies to reveal the home menu. It’s over in a matter of moments, but it’s distinguishing, classy and just the right degree of show-offish.
As for the menu itself, well, that’s just different enough to be slightly unintuitive at first. Unlike Microsoft, which has retained its existing interface, ensuring a smooth transition from Xbox One to Xbox Series – though that continuity has the side-effect of making your costly new piece of hardware feel slightly less special – Sony has changed the UI for PS5, and it takes some getting used to. Which isn’t to say it’s badly designed, by any means. We accept that some of our early awkwardness is down to muscle memory: after seven years of PS4, we operate its menus on autopilot, and it’s clear it’ll take a little longer before we can say the same of the new setup. After a week or so, we’re finally getting used to tapping the PS button as opposed to holding it when we want to put the console in rest mode. Here, a long press brings up the Games and Media menu bar – where the icons take up only a small portion of the screen, leaving plenty of room to display the accompanying art – while a short press brings up the new control centre, which you can personalise, letting you add shortcuts to the features you use most. Streamers will doubtless want to make sure the Broadcast menu is front and centre, while it makes perfect sense to give players the option to have Accessibility settings within easy reach.
A potentially more transformative feature is the new activity cards, which pop up when you tap the PS button while playing a game. These display recent activity from whatever you’ve been playing, from screenshots to trophies you’ve not yet unlocked, to official news stories relating to the games in your collection. But within Sackboy’s Big Adventure, we also get a glimpse of how they’ll let you skip to different points in the game, with specific challenges detailed in the card’s description. These, we gather, will be curated for each game by the developers; in this instance the functionality isn’t especially exciting since we’re only allowed to skip to stages we’ve already unlocked. The challenges set in each case amount to no more than collecting everything within the level and earning a gold-medal score. Still, we can see there’s great potential for more inventive use of such a feature; imagine jumping straight into a game when a friend posts a new high score or beats your fastest time on the leaderboards to reclaim your lead.
If the rather perfunctory challenges here are disappointing, the same can’t be said for the speed at which you’re delivered to the start line. PS5 may be giving up two teraflops to the higher-end Xbox model (just over ten compared to 12), but it also boasts a solid-state drive that runs at a speed of 5.5GB/sec, making Series X’s 2.4GB/sec SSD look positively sluggish. It doesn’t, however, have the Xbox Series hardware’s Quick Resume functionality where multiple games can be suspended and swapped between. Instead, the control centre’s Switcher menu highlights the current active game and two recently played titles – and since we’ve been using both consoles a lot in recent weeks, we’ve been caught out once or twice by failing to save before switching to another PS5 game.
Yet if that’s something to watch out for should you be lucky enough to afford both devices, in real terms the difference is negligible. Besides, loading times are so quick it doesn’t matter. From a standing start, we try booting up Astro’s Playroom, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles
ACTIVITY CARDS, WHICH POP UP WHEN YOU TAP THE PS BUTTON WHILE PLAYING A GAME, DISPLAY RECENT ACTIVITY FROM WHATEVER YOU’VE BEEN PLAYING
Morales, Sackboy’s Big Adventure and Bugsnax in short order: for all of them, we’re ready to play between 12 and 20 seconds. And we’re not just talking about hitting the main menu, but actually nudging the stick forward to move each game’s protagonist – albeit having mashed the X button to hurry along the various splash screens.
And when you’re in the games, loading times are startlingly quick. We boot up our New Game+ save on Miles Morales, and no more than two seconds later the protagonist is perched on the edge of a building, ready to leap off. Around the same amount of time after we’ve chosen to hop on the subway to the other side of Manhattan, Morales strolls up the steps to street level. Finally, fast travel in open-world games isn’t a misnomer; elsewhere, we suspect loading-screen tips may become a thing of the past given how little time you have to read them. True, this isn’t really a point of distinction – Xbox Series X is similarly speedy, with Yakuza: Like A Dragon’s hints vanishing so quickly you could blink and miss them. But even if we had the facility to test multiple versions of the same game (alas, publishers don’t tend to send out review code for more than one platform) we’d be quibbling over a few seconds at most. Those times may climb as the generation progresses and we get more ambitious games that demand extra from the hardware. For now, it’s just a joy to get into a game that much more quickly, to jump from not playing to playing in under half a minute when our leisure time is at a premium.
It’s perhaps fitting that the longest wait we’re subjected to for any game we test is The Last Guardian, which brings us to the subject of backwards compatibility. March 2020 may seem like a lifetime ago, but it’s worth remembering the consternation wrought by Mark Cerny’s apparent confirmation that only 100 PS4 games would be playable on PS5. Fortunately that’s turned out not to be the case – though the publisher’s immediate clarification muddled the issue further – but while Sony doesn’t go as far as Microsoft’s legacy support, almost all PS4 games will be playable on PS5.
For PlayStation Plus subscribers, that includes a hand-picked selection of the older hardware’s best-loved games, available for no extra cost on day one. There are 20 at launch, and for the most part it’s a strong list, from Batman: Arkham Knight to Resident Evil 7 and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. If you have PS4 discs you’ll be able to play them on PS5, though you’ll have to download your cloud saves manually. And the drive isn’t as quiet as the rest of the hardware; it’s oddly apt that these older games sound like they’re being played on a PS4. But not all of them look like it, with several noticeably enhanced by that extra horsepower. Although when we return to Fumito Ueda’s last-gen masterpiece, it’s our steelbook edition that seems to run more smoothly than the digital edition. Indeed, of the handful of games we test, the results are mixed, suggesting Sony hasn’t gone to the same lengths as its competitor to improve the performance of last-gen games. While we weren’t fans of Days Gone, those who did enjoy Bend Studio’s zombie sandbox will be pleased to learn that it now runs at a consistent 60fps. From Software’s Bloodborne, by contrast, is still stuck at 30. Both boast shortened loading times – though even so, they’re hardly optimised to Miles Morales levels.
But then Sony’s focus hasn’t been on buffing up older games, rather investing in brand-new ones. Its firstparty slate is, in large part, what made PS4 so appealing to so many millions of players, and it can boast a handful of day-one exclusives to counter Microsoft’s two-pronged attack. True, there are no obvious tentpoles, but with Miles Morales and Demon’s Souls, it has a robust action-adventure and a lavish remake for its core audience, with Sackboy’s Big Adventure for undemanding kids and Gearbox looter Godfall as a timed console exclusive. Throw in Bugsnax (free on PS Plus) and the pre-installed Astro’s Playroom, and while there’s no Breath Of The Wild here, PS5 has plenty at launch to call its own – even with Destruction AllStars pushed back to February as a PS Plus title.
That’s without considering a broad array of thirdparty titles. Albeit presumably a loss
FOR NOW, IT’S JUST A JOY TO GET INTO A GAME THAT MUCH MORE QUICKLY, TO JUMP FROM NOT PLAYING TO PLAYING IN UNDER HALF A MINUTE