PS4: Why Sony Didn't Show The Box
Breaking down the thinking behind the PlayStation 4's absence at its reveal event.
February 27, 2013
by Keza MacDonald
Although last week’s unveiling of the PlayStation 4 was received well, one question was left reverberating around the room as Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Andrew House left the stage: why didn’t they show the box? It was unprecedented for a console announcement. Alright, Nintendo didn’t actually wheel out a Wii U at E3 in 2011, but there were at least pictures of the thing.
For Sony, there will be a certain irony to the fact that so many people are fixating on the appearance of a plastic box after a conference that delivered a good two hours of new games, feature reveals and technological vision. Sony’s messaging at the PlayStation 4 conference was centred firmly on what the new console offers (the PlayStation “ecosystem” in corporate-speak), rather than the piece of hardware. What’s much more interesting than the PlayStation 4’s eventual appearance is the reasoning behind the company’s decision not to show it.
Sony’s answer to this question – asked, inevitably, by a procession of journalists after the event – varies depending on whom you ask. Sony Japan’s Hiroshi Kawano claimed that he hadn’t even seen the final design. Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said it’s “just a box”. Sony Europe’s Jim Ryan, speaking to me the day after the conference, reckoned “in our mind it’s like 10, 20, 50x more important to demonstrate what that PS4 can actually do as opposed to what it looks like” – all fair points.
Sony's own answer depends on whom you ask.
Of course, the other factor here is that Sony had to leave something for the next 6 months – E3, Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show are still far ahead, and the company will need things to announce. “It wasn’t like yesterday was the start and the end of the game for PlayStation 4. It was just the start of the process,” explained a perfectly reasonable Jim Ryan. But Sony’s decision not to show the box wasn’t just about controlling the flow of information. It’s also an insight into how the company has changed since the PlayStation 3 was in development.
For a very, very long time, Sony was a company run by engineers. That’s been changing slowly over the past decade or so, and especially in the last five years, as Kaz Hirai took the helm of the PlayStation business from Ken Kutaragi in 2006 and rose to the top of the global business in 2012, leaving Andrew House in charge of the gaming division. Neither of these men is an engineer, and this change in the company’s leadership is most evident in how Sony it pitching its newest product.
Where the PlayStation 3 announcement period was all about technical specs and hardware design – there were literally slides with bullet-point lists of features behind Kaz Hirai at E3 2006 – the PlayStation 4 reveal was all about the experience. It was about Sony’s attempt at creating a meaningful social network around PS4 and PSN, it was about personalisation, and crucially it was about the games. If you’d told me before that conference that there would be not one single graph, I wouldn’t have believed you. It was almost a relief when Mark Cerny briefly gibbered about “realistic transmissive materials with substantial sub-surface scattering”.
“I think if you look at some of the decisions that were taken in the past on other [Sony] platforms, you can see that engineer influence perhaps a little excessively apparent,” said Jim Ryan. “But the management structure we have now, whether it’s Kaz Hirai running the whole shooting match – an old-time PlayStation guy who gets gaming and is certainly not an engineer by any stretch of the imagination – or Andy [House] who equally is not an engineer, you’ve got people with very strong consumer intuition, very strong market-led perspectives, and I think that came across yesterday.
“As you said, the same event 5 years ago was all graphs about processing power, whereas yesterday was around the consumer experience. It was experiential in its nature. I think that can only be a good thing.”
Showing the console might actually have undermined Sony’s message.
This is a big transition for Sony. “We believe that PlayStation 4 represents a significant shift from thinking of PlayStation as merely a box or a console, to thinking of PlayStation as a leading authority on play,” said Andrew House in the opening minutes of the conference. So much so, it seems, that they weren’t going to show the box at all. Doing so might actually have undermined Sony’s message.
Another huge change is Sony’s ever-decreasing reliance on its own proprietary technology, upon which the company is built. Where the PlayStation 3 was engineering- and hardware led (and massively, ruinously expensive to develop and launch, which was a major factor in Kutaragi’s sidelining from the company in 2007), the PlayStation 4 is “developer led and consumer inspired”, in the words of Andrew House, with PC-like architecture that the developers themselves helped to design.
This is a long way from the PlayStation 3’s CELL chip, designed in isolation in Sony’s engineering department. Sony’s Mark Cerny summed it up well during the conference itself: “Much less value is found today in exotic technology like blast processing or a supercomputer on a chip. The need to radically customise technology can interfere with the design innovation that’s so central to game creation.”
So: why didn’t Sony show the box? There are several good reasons: because it may genuinely not have been finalised yet; because Sony wants to keep information back for the rest of the year; because, perhaps, it genuinely wasn’t felt to be that important. And by holding its own event but not revealing something so crucial, Sony has not only got out in front of the competition, but ensured that there will be something more to talk about later.
If you ask me, it was a deliberate omission, and a statement of intent.
But if you ask me, it was a deliberate omission, and a statement of intent. Sony wanted to demonstrate how far it had come since 2006, from a company focussed on expensive, loss-leading hardware to a modern company focussed on software, on services and – most importantly for people like us – for games. Sony wasn’t just talking to gamers last Wednesday, it was talking to its long-suffering shareholders and potential future investors, too – and they will have been pleased to see this change.
As for when we will see it – none of Sony’s executives will spill. But I’d stake my house on E3. If I had one, anyway.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
