It's like corporations don't know how to do anything but enshittify anymore

End of an era for just about everything. Streaming is all enshitified. The job market is shit. Democracy is falling apart. Decades of progress being undone. It's just the way it will be until people get sick of all this shit and start doing things differently and move on. All the great old companies are dead. Either turned to zombie brands or run by zombies. I remember how excited I was to buy my first Sony Trinitron, my first walkman, my Sony component stereo, first PlayStation.

If buying does not equal owning something, piracy can't equal theft. At this rate, what's the point of consoles?

No, this is just playstation continuing to hate their customer base.

They've always hated their customers. Between Sony, and Nintendo, I dont know who hates their customers the most... but they both certainly try.

and it doesnt matter, because they both have enough fanboys that strip off their clothes and gleefully dance naked and joyous in the rain of shit both companies sputter out of their assholes and down onto their customers.

Its like they saw how much Xbox has been sucking and thought "hold on, instead of building on this market lead, I bet we could beat Xbox in enshittifying!"

I don't understand why anyone would choose to buy a console after this. The only draws of consoles was the turnkey hardware, which you can generally get with Proton now, and access to physical games, which won't be a thing soon. Now it's just a locked-down PC with a DRM storefront that makes you pay a subscription to pay online games and which may or may not have backwards compatibility from system to system.

Maybe that's just the PC gamer in me talking. Are there any advantages to console anymore? Like, a single benefit?

Can anyone come up with a single example of an industry that's not getting simultaneously worse (and/or smaller), and more expensive?

Not really end of an era, you're just witnessing a monopoly forming since Xbox is pretty much dead in the water. I guess it's technically a duopoly since Nintendo is fine, but Nintendo kinda does its own thing without regard to what others do. Basically, with Xbox out of the picture, Sony is free to do whatever it wants.

definitely end of an era.
I'm not buying a console without physical media.

Sony can kill the second hand market if they want, but that was the last thing that differentiated them from Steam. Good bye Playstation, i'll remember you fondly.

They are also lobbying to make hosting your own videogame server illegal: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/esa-bafflingly-declares-private-minecraft-servers-illegal-in-stop-killing-games-hearing-we-consider-it-piracy-we-have-lawsuits/

Sony is part of ESA.

I can’t speak to market trends, but I can say this 100% makes my PS5 my last Sony console. I’ve bought every one, and the only reason I continue to buy them is so I can collect exclusives on disc for my collection.

A digital only console is just a bad, expensive gaming PC. I already have a good expensive gaming PC, so I’ll just buy games digitally there.

Don't forget they also paid $3.6 Billion for Bungie just to shut down their most popular game and put all their hope in their new extraction shooter that's been struggling. No new games in dev or even green lit. Also they just laid off a bunch of people.

Don't forget that they've halted PC ports for their games, including shitcanning nearly-complete work on Ghost of Yōtei.

A funny anecdote from outside gaming land:

Sony mirrorless cameras, even MEGA expensive ones, have this quirk where they can’t film 30P HEVC video.

The A6700 for instance, can record 24, 30, 60 h.264, but only 24 or 60 h.265. The A7C II is particularly handicapped, with only 24 h.265.

The $7000 A1 flagship is the same. It doesn’t make any sense; all their hardware supports it.

Why?

Well, people kept asking Sony, and someone finally got a response:

https://us.community.sony.com/s/question/0D54O00007B6m2ISAR/why-sony-a7s-iii-doesnt-support-25-or-30-fps-in-h265-codech265-is-available-for-24-50-60-100-120-fps-but-not-the-once-ive-mentioned-aboveplease-sony-update-this-h265-is-going-to-get-more-and-more-popular-with-new-powerful-laptops-coming?language=en_US

Hello, Sony's commitment to customer satisfaction is our top priority. The reason for that is that we determined the current product specifications from our analyses of target users and available technologies. For XAVC HS, we envision users enjoying HLG movies by connecting the camera to an HDR (HLG) compatible BRAVIA TV over HDMI, and 60p is what we view as the default setting for playback with it. To record movies in higher quality in 4K/30p, we would recommend selecting XAVC S and XAVC S-I, 10-bit 4:2:2 sampling, either Long GoP and All-I codec. Could you tell us how creators such as yourself want to use HEVC at 30p so we can provide feedback to our design team?

I found that oddly enlightening.

“Well, it’s not optimal for a BRAVIA TV over HDMI, so why would users want this? Why is it worth it for us to waste half a kilobyte for this option in the UI?” Sony cannot fathom anything outside that.

It makes that whole list in OP’s post make total sense. It’s not even cynicism on their part; with that mindset, what would they need a disk player for? What value is Bluepoint is a business review?

They literally cannot understand why PlayStation users would want any of those things. It’s outside the domain.

Bad notice…. I like phisical disc, not is good for ever this system, and one question: you pay the game, but not is you own, not?

The entire reason I've ever bought consoles and games was because I could get used games at a bargain and also sell my old consoles and game collections when I'm done with them. I can't imagine that I'm the only person who looked at it this way.

Now console producers pull shit like this when they can't even claim to be more user friendly than PC because SteamOS is a real competitor.

Well I guess it was good while it lasted, at least until the last few years when greed fully took over. Microsoft is already on it's last leg and Sony and Nintendo are going to follow eventually.

Yeah, that’s the end of PlayStation for me. Hopefully someone else will come out with something decent.

It warms my heart to see that EVERY comment on Sony's blog post about it is negative. Hope the decision ends up biting Sony in the ass, but even if not, at least people weren't silent about it.

EDIT: and they're being yelled at everywhere else on the internet that people can post as well. Good.

I bought every PlayStation ever released. I will not be buying this one. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper over time. The gaming sector is going to go tits up and I hope it does.

Meh, I’m done with consoles. The exclusives will come to emulators eventually, and there will be plenty of PC games in the meantime.

They're also shutting down PS3 and PSVita store access, to add insult to injury.

Why are people still buying shit from Sony? It would be less work to just flush your cash directly down the shitter.

I feel like defending consoles is a lost cause at this point. We can’t trust any of the big 3 anymore.

I don't pay $70 for a game I can't even sell after using it.

They're betting on consumers being too impulsive and stupid to care, and... they're probably right. Nothing's stopped them before, this likely isn't a new line in the sand for them.