Random Roar: PS3’s Not Dead! Nor Should It Ever Be…

 

When gamers woke up to the startling realization that, not only was Nintendo serious about only selling certain anniversary titles up until April 1st, but that Sony was joining the party by vaulting their older PlayStation titles, it got  lot of people talking about game preservation, especially since there was no real indication that Sony ever intended to bring their games back at a future date in order to sell them to a new generation of gamer.  (And of course, Neither did Nintendo.)

By “vaulting” I mean that they were planning on putting them in a metaphorical vault and denying anyone the privilege of buying them ever again, like when Disney used to put their movies away in the “Disney Vault” and created artificial scarcity in order to drive up sales when the movies became available again.  Plus, it didn’t hurt that once DVD and BluRay technology became available, Disney could add new bonus features that would drive sales further up.  Oooh, the “Special Edition” comes with deleted scenes, music videos, an interactive DVD game and a virtual safari, but the newer “Diamond Edition” has a feature talking about the Broadway version, even more deleted scenes and a memoir from the producer, plus special features from the “Special Edition” as well!  Surely you want to also own the Diamond Edition, right????

Perhaps Sony thought it was far too soon in the PlayStation 5’s life to damage their brand with bad press when not a lot of people have the new machine in the first place, but once they saw the very vocal backlash that their announcement caused, they relented for all but the PSP.  This is probably because the PSP is so obsolete that gamers have to rely on cell phone tethering or finding someone still using archaic technology to reach the Internet in order to connect the device to the PSN, since most modern routers have security that the PSP isn’t programmed to recognize, and not everyone can get into their router to downgrade their security.  That isn’t to say that no one uses their PSP any more, it just can’t connect to the PSN without additional help.

One of the good things about the mostly averted PSN-pocalypse is that it got everyone talking about game preservation again.  Editorials like this one proposed what we’ve likely known for years, that emulation or something similar is going to be the best bet for keeping older titles alive.  Backwards compatibility sure isn’t going to do the job.

The biggest obstacle preventing backwards compatibility is that game media is designed to be incompatible from one generation to the next, and it’s kind of rare for systems to be backwards compatible out of the box like the PlayStation 2 or Nintendo DS were.  It’s actually quite dumb that game cartridges from the NES can’t be put into a SNES without a third party device like the Super 8, a device that didn’t even exist until very late in the life of the SNES.  Yes, it’s a function of the drastically changing technology used to play games, but video gaming seems to be the only medium that gets away with reinventing itself every five years, requiring its users to buy brand new machines and start buying a different kind of disc or cartridge than before if they want to keep playing new games.  Books don’t come out with new formats every five years, a physical book is still bundles of bound paper and are still available today, and the technology to deliver movies gets adopted so slowly that DVDs have been replaced by newer technology several times over by now, but are still profitable enough that they continue to be released despite the arrival of both a higher capacity format and the digital future.

By the time DVDs took over from VHS, the vast majority of the VHS library had already been re-released on DVD, so the transition of power, so to speak, could be relatively painless.  Granted, the timing of the transition was a little rough – there’s nothing like a complete VHS library of Star Wars films consisting of all of the first six episodes except the third one – but enough consumers had made the transition to DVD that it made enough financial sense to finally abandon video cassettes.  We just don’t see that with video games.  There aren’t a lot of games that get re-released when a new machine comes out, and the majority of the ones that do are only re-released because they were super successful in the first place and their publisher thinks they can squeeze more money out of the game by updating the graphics and maybe adding an extra dungeon or minigame.

But releasing an older game on a new machine can be seen as a cynical cash grab when each new gaming generation arrives every five to seven years or so, the game’s already been re-released before, and the marketing is obviously geared towards players who already own the game as much as it’s geared towards players who don’t.  Sure, Final Fantasy Chronicles comes with 3D cutscenes and a sprint button that the original version didn’t have, but Final Fantasy IV Advance also comes with bonus dungeons and the ability to choose your party for the final battle.  Surely you also want to own the Advance version, right????  And in two more years, you can buy the game yet again, with voice acting, PS1 style 3D graphics and a new system for customizing the abilities of characters!  You want to own every single version of this game, right?????????

Re-releasing a game with new features isn’t game preservation any more than releasing the special edition of Star Wars preserves the original version for those who preferred it.  You can say that Final Fantasy IV Advance is the better version of the game because it contains one of the best translations for the game and because they didn’t dummy out any of the characters’ abilities this time around, but there’s a reason players fell in love with the original, and they might want to experience it once again.

For a while, it looked like the solution for game preservation was going to be systems like the Wii’s Virtual Console, but there was never a plan to keep the Virtual Console going, nor to stock it with all of the games that were once published on Nintendo’s consoles.

I suppose we should’ve expected that the Virtual Console would be as fleeting as the consoles it emulated.  And now we’ve been faced with the mortality of pretty much every PlayStation prior to 4.  Sony has been more than patient with us, not even giving us an indication that they were going to pull the plug on them until very recently, and even when they do finally remove the PSP’s games from the network, they’re still going to be supporting digital sales to four systems.

Going forward, Sony is going to need to figure out a better time to pull their older PlayStation titles and maybe give more warning to their users and to the developers making games for them.  The last game released for the PlayStation 3 was in August of last year, but there was still development happening for the Vita when Sony originally announced they were pulling the plug.  They can schedule the pulling of the Vita’s plug whenever they want, I imagine, but it might be a good idea to give developers a head’s up first, and maybe not keep selling development kits right up until they make the announcement.

It would also be in their best interest to give their support of the PlayStation 3’s digital games a meaningful end date and not just some random day they announce a few months ahead of time.  In this humble gamer’s opinion – although I do think games should be available forever – the best date to pull the PlayStation 3’s games from their network should be the debut of the PlayStation 6.

Let’s be honest, we all know there’s going to be a sixth one.  People keep predicting the current generation is going to be the last one, or the next generation will be the last, that games are going to fundamentally change so much that putting out new consoles are going to be a thing of the past, but then like clockwork, a new batch always comes out.  So my thought is that Sony should hold on to their PlayStation 3 library and then when they develop the PlayStation 6, they should look into solutions for the backwards compatibility problem so that they don’t have to remove games from their store at all.  Since they’re not going to do that, they should instead announce the release date of the new console at least a year prior and also make the announcement that the very same day the new system is going to be released is also going to be the last day that the PlayStation 3 is going to be supported in the PSN.  Of course you’d still be allowed to re-download your games afterwards, at least for a while, but common sense seems to indicate that’s going to eventually go away as well.

This way, gamers will have a handy reminder of when the old games are going away, along with more than enough time to get what games they might still want to play.  You could make the argument that gamers had enough warning this time, of course, and that’s probably true, I can’t really argue that giving people several months wouldn’t have been enough time.

What I hope Sony learned from this is that yes, Jim Ryan, there are people who want to play games that don’t look as impressive as the shiny new toys currently being advertised.  I can name plenty of PS1 games that hold up in both the graphics and gameplay departments, and the same goes for the PS2, the first era where you could say that game design peaked.  Developers had learned from the first twenty years of game development and created some truly 10/10 games.  You can easily say the same for the PS3, there are some truly memorable experiences to be had.  Right now I have Valkyria Chronicles sitting in my PS3, waiting for me to finish this Roar so I can get back to it, and I have several more games I’m eager to play, waiting in the wings.  Whether Sony likes it or not, the PS3 isn’t quite dead yet.