For whatever reason, Sony doesn’t hold PlayStation Showcases with the sort of regularity many hope for, which means we hear demands of a new event only, oh I don’t know, all the fricking time. But seriously, we really need a new PlayStation Showcase now.
But let’s back up, because it’s not like there hasn’t been any PlayStation event in a while. In fact, we had one just now. Sony held the year’s first State of Play recently, and it was… underwhelming- from a certain perspective, at least. It was a forty-minute-plus presentation as advertised, and to be entirely fair, it’s not like it didn’t feature anything noteworthy. In fact, on paper, just looking at a list of all the games that it featured, some might even consider it a solid show. We got new trailers for the likes of Borderlands 4, the long-awaited Lost Soul Aside, Split Fiction, MindsEye, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Lies of P’s expansion, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Directive 8020, and more. On top of that, there were also some solid new announcements, with Returnal developer Housemarque’s third-person roguelite shooter Saros being perhaps the most prominent one.
To say that this most recent State of Play had nothing of note to show wouldn’t entirely be accurate. Why, then, has it been deemed less-than-satisfactory by many (yours truly included)? Well, because it came at a time where PlayStation fans had already been hoping for something much more prominent and large-scale for much longer than ideal. To be fair, the company has never really positioned State of Play as that kind of an event. The distinction between a State of Play and a PlayStation Showcase has always been abundantly clear to all concerned, with the latter generally featuring way more of the shiny, headline-grabbing announcements and reveals you’d ordinarily expect to see at, say, The Game Awards, or at an E3 showcase (back when E3 was still a thing, at least). Admittedly, 2023’s PlayStation Showcase was pretty disappointing- which the next one hopefully will not be.
Which brings us back to where we kicked this off- we do need a PlayStation Showcase now. Sony’s first-party lineup has looked shockingly and uncharacteristically sparse for about a couple of years at this point (at least as far as the company’s trademark premium AAA story-driven games are concerned), but slowly yet surely, that lineup is beginning to fill out again. Given the fact that PlayStation Showcases are generally where Sony likes to show off the bulk of its first-party titles, many have hoped for some time that another one of those events won’t be too far away, given that updates on quite a few titles seem due at this point. Frustration with how the most recent State of Play event turned out seems much more understandable in that context. In fact, State of Plays do often feature major first-party titles (from Ghost of Yotei to Astro Bot to even the aforementioned Saros), so the fact that Sony seems to be holding first-party announcements and updates back seems particularly confusing.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, for instance, is due out sometime this year, and many had hoped that we’d get a new trailer for the game soon, maybe even with a release date announcement. Hideo Kojima himself had dropped a couple of teases in recent days that suggested that he was at work on a new trailer for the upcoming open world title, after which it seemed almost like a lock for the State of Play that just happened. Of course, we now know that a dedicated Death Stranding 2 panel is going to happen on March 9, with Kojima in attendance to reveal new information- so hopefully that’s where we’ll get that new trailer and that release date announcement.
Then there’s Ghost of Yotei, another game that Sony is officially set to release this year- which means marketing is going to pick up the pace in the months to come. Expectations of a new imminent trailer don’t seem entirely unreasonable, then. There’s also Marvel’s Wolverine, which may not be due for 2025, but having been announced close to four years ago at this point, and having had no new trailers or updates in that time, a new look is long overdue- especially if the game is indeed targeting a 2026 release as leaks have claimed.
And that’s not all, in terms of officially announced first-party PlayStation games. Fairgame$ has been radio silent since its announcement a couple of years ago, and that silence has grown deafening in the aftermath of Concord’s disastrous implosion- all of which has raised countless questions about when (or if) Sony will show the game again. Marathon is in the works at Bungie, and it, too, hasn’t had a single showing since its 2023 announcement. Guerrilla’s co-op Horizon game was officially confirmed to be in development a while back, and has seemingly been in the works for quite some time, to the point where it’s likely to be the next game that the studio releases- and yet, an announcement remains elusive. There’s also Intergalactic, of course- though that was only just announced in December, and doesn’t even have a release window yet, which means we may not see it again for a while.
Beyond that, leaks have spoken about (among other things) a new God of War game set in back Greece and starring a younger Kratos, a remastered collection of the older God of War titles, and in the past, about a Spider-Man spinoff starring Venom. The point is that there’s no shortage of games that Sony can (and needs to) talk about- whether that’s officially announced titles in need of new looks and updates, or games that it seems to be on the verge of announcing (assuming, of course, that those leaks are accurate). Common sense would suggest that Sony is saving up all of those announcements to have a big, splashy PlayStation Showcase, one where it will have a long list of major first-party announcements to make (in addition, hopefully, to a fair few third-party ones as well). Either that, or Sony continues to have nothing to say about all (or most) of those aforementioned games in the pipeline- which would be concerning, to say the least.
It is worth keeping in mind that PlayStation Showcases don’t keep to a fixed schedule. They stuck to an annual cadence in 2020 and 2021, before skipping 2022, then returning in 2023, and then skipping 2024 again. Does that mean Sony will be back with another PlayStation Showcase this year? It could. Then again, given Sony’s unpredictability in this department, two consecutive years where there’s no PlayStation Showcase might also be on the cards.
Our hope is that we get a new showcase in the coming months. Summer is when Sony usually holds these events, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that May or June will bring a new PlayStation Showcase. We’re also hoping that it will be an actual, proper showcase that justifies the two years that we will have waited for it (if it does happen), unlike what happened in 2023. If Sony does showcase a good number of it’s upcoming first-party titles (especially the non-live service ones), we likely won’t have anything to worry about on that front. Until the company actually officially announces the event in question, however, we’re really just counting our chickens before they’ve hatched, so here’s hoping a PlayStation Showcase 2025 does indeed happen.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
