To Reiterate: Clarity vs. Context
The Last Of Us Part 1 is out today.
As are a lot of opinions.
I offer no opinion on the game, but I have concerns about the business.
$70.00 to start is a steep cliff. The logic that games have been $60 for a long time and thus must raise their prices seems reasonable, but only if there is no context. It is an entertainment product, not medicine. The context is that people can choose to purchase a substitute. Even as production prices increase, the size of the market has been increasing much faster. So far the video game industry has been very profitable at $60 a game (so profitable even the World Economic Forum is talking about it). The video games industry is so dominant that Microsoft could have purchased every NBA team for about what they paid to acquire Activision/Blizzard.
At this time any increase that might impact overall industry sales is questionable, especially as entertainment options increase. 10 years ago the Netflix catalogue was much smaller, Kindle was novel, and online sports gambling was almost non-existent. Now for $70 a month a person can have access to an expansive Netflix catalogue, the Amazon Prime movie and TV catalogue also including comics and books through Kindle and Comixology, and still have $35 to bet on professional sports. Couch entertainment options are cheap and plentiful.
Not only are the options plentiful, but the content is too. While remasters are not new in any industry they never constituted a substantial part of a content catalogue. Limited edition remasters of movies like The Wizard of Oz or musical albums like Raw Power by Iggy Pop and the Stooges exist, but these are usually niche parts of a burgeoning industry with a saturated library. Remakes, on the other hand, are a relatively new occurrence. Remakes are usually executed when advances in technology make something possible that wasn't before and thus make a great leap in quality or execution. Two of the most famous examples being the recent remakes of the movies Dune and the mini-series turned movie IT. Remakes are less niche and target the general market and are starting to constitute a more substantial part of a content catalogue. Because remakes target the general market they tend to be re-iterations of much older properties, at least 10 years or more. The goal is to bridge the gap between the novelty of nostalgia and the value of relevance. Successful remakes have proven that a remake must deliver content in a way that brings the old generation of fans back and a new generation of fans forward. A successful remake, by every measure, must feel like new content without the necessity of consuming older content, in contrast to sequels.
Now we have The Last of Us Part 1. It is priced above it's original (The Last of Us 2013). It is a full remake with a new engine and uses new technology, but has it been long enough to bring old fans back and does the content feel new enough to bring new fans in?
Given the context, TLOU Part 1 doesn't have the attributes of a successful remake, even if it is beautiful and a great game. The PS5 simply doesn't have the install base to bring a swath of new fans. A remake like this much later in the PS5 life would have made more sense. Also the technological improvements are novel, but do not make a generational leap that delivers an integral creative vision that is vastly different or impossible to deliver with older technology. Instead it shares attributes with something far more common and far more concerning. TLOU Part 1 is similar to a "generational leap" in a EA Sports title. Look at the way EA Sports sold their Ignite Engine.
EA touted that not only had the graphics improved, but the physics, animations, and AI had improved. This was more than an annual release with updated rosters and jerseys. This was increased immersion. It was a generational leap forward for all of their sports titles. But they are sports games so there was no concern about significant changes in any type of story it may deliver. There was no story context to a football game. It was all about improving the clarity of the experience to make the player feel more immersed. Now compare that to how PlayStation is touting TLOU Part 1.
Shawn Layden was watching PlayStation from the inside during the epoch of the PS5 and warned that the model was unsustainable. The library was shrinking and the budgets were growing. Now we are 2 years into PS5 and compared to the first-party library after 2 years of PS4, the PS5 library is definitely growing slower than last generation. Before TLOU Part 1 it was easy to argue quality over quantity. With TLOU Part 1, not only is it harder to argue that PlayStation is focused on quality over quantity, it is hard to argue that PlayStation isn't behaving like other companies that are trying to achieve unsustainable growth. Even arguing that PlayStation won't use bad online practices is moot because of the Gran Turismo 7 launch fiasco.
With each passing day the strategies that PlayStation is employing are more and more like strategies we see from Electronic Arts. The greatest threat to the industry, and those that enjoy the products it produces, is Sony Group Corporation and it's leader Kenichiro Yoshida applying an unreasonable amount of pressure to PlayStation to produce unsustainable growth. We have seen in the past with companies like Nintendo and the late Satoru Iwata that sometimes it is better to slow down, admit failures, share the loss, and re-assess. We have also seen what happens when corporate leadership drives a hardware producer out of the market. The question is if Sony Group Corporation, which has been consistently posting Year over Year losses for each quarter of 2022, make the Nintendo move or take the Sega dive. For the good of the industry and consumers I hope PlayStation takes a step back, re-asses, and can return to the industry leader they were with the PS1, PS2, and PS4.
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