The PlayStation 4 Is A Sandwich

Well, that was odd.

The PlayStation 4 has been announced. Sony’s massive PR machine unveiled it yesterday in what was intended to be the big, get-excited, showstopping event that would generate enough buzz about the new platform to keep the internet salivating until launch. Instead, the whole event was met with a resounding chorus of — well, not much, really.

 It wasn’t that the event was a debacle, exactly. The new console seems interesting enough. Perhaps Sony hasn’t heard the term “damning with faint praise.” At an event that should have been meticulously orchestrated to show it’s new product in the best possible light, Sony barely managed to clear its own lowered bar.

Imagine, if you will, a Las Vegas magician on stage. He talks a great game. He has the audience eating out of his hand. Under a cloth at the center of the stage, the magician claims is a fantastic object the likes of which has never been seen before. As the audience holds its collective breath, he waggles his eyebrows, pauses for effect, and dramatically whisks the cloth away to reveal…

a sandwich. A pretty tasty-looking sandwich, but just, you know, a sandwich.

On Wednesday night, Sony revealed many, many sandwiches.

Let’s list them, shall we? First, we have Knack, which looks like a perfectly fine platformer, but hardly a showstopper. Next up is Killzone: Shadow Fall, which is visually gorgeous, but looks like the standard cover-based shooter we’ve all seen under various names on the consoles already on the market. Infamous: Second Son looks neat, but there’s only an opening cinematic to show for it. The Witness might be a revolutionary mind-bending puzzler, but how would we ever know from a bunch of empty environments that might as well have been screenshots for the lack of activity they showed?

Media Molecule woke things up for a minute or two with its digital puppetry demo, but there was no word on what, exactly, it was or what sort of game might come out of it. Watchdogs actually gave us gameplay footage that looks truly amazing, but here’s the thing: It’s not a PS4 exclusive. You’ll be able to play it on your PC or the new Xbox. The same goes for Bungie’s Destiny.

Even the appearance of Blizzard’s Chris Metzen, which seemed to signal a major announcement, gave us (drumroll) a new new version of Diablo III. Which has been available on the PC since May. Whoop-dee-doo.

And of course, there’s the fact that we never even saw the PS4 itself. In the last 24 hours, the argument has been made that the physical appearance of the console isn’t all that important. The hardware inside is what makes the pretty pictures, so who cares what plastic box it comes in?

It’s a fair point, but it’s easily countered with another question: Sure, you technically don’t have to show the console itself, but why on Earth wouldn’t you? It raises all sorts of odd speculation and awkward questions that Sony could just as easily have avoided.

So, why exactly did Sony make such a big announcement without an actual console to show? The simplest explanation is the correct one. It just plain isn’t ready. That’s a good summary of basically everything Sony had on display. The whole presentation felt half baked. Even the streaming and cloud technology that Sony supposedly hopes to make a core selling point of the system will be “rolled out in phases,” per David Perry of Gaikai. That’s code for “we’re not done yet.” Of course not. Sony’s only owned Gaikai since July.

This is as close to a console as you get right now.

Why not wait? Why show off a half-finished product with a slew of half-finished games and declare the whole thing will be available by Christmas? Sony was roundly criticized for allowing the Xbox 360 to beat the PS3 to market and therefore squandering the dominant market share that the PS2 had enjoyed. Is Sony that afraid of getting beaten to the punch again? Even if the company does have that motivating fear, shouldn’t it have waited until there’s actually a finished product to show off?

The PS4 isn’t dead on arrival by any means. However, now Sony has to dig itself out of a hole it could very easily have avoided with a little patience.