Jim Ryan is WRONG
The News
Jim Ryan, the President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment is wrong. Probably about a lot of things, but specifically relevant now is his stance on older video games. He seems to abhor them almost, preferring instead to see graphical tech demos than innovative gameplay.
If you missed the news, the online stores for Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable games will shut down on July 2 of this year, and the PS Vita store will shut down on August 27. Thousands of games across five different consoles will suddenly be no longer available for purchase by new gamers. This script was, admittedly, originally written with the original thought that existing customers would no longer be able to re-download their purchases either, but I think this is still worth talking about. Many of these games are not available elsewhere, either having never received physical copies or not being ported to other systems. Many of these games were greatly improved or enhanced through post-launch updates, which will also be unavailable.
The thought of that is terrifying. And for those of you who seek comfort in what seems like a readily-available market of super cheap physical PS3 releases: Keep in mind that once GameStop decides to stop selling them, prices will rise. And PS1 and PS2 games - which already have far higher prices than they often should - will SOAR as legal ways to play them without the disc continue to vanish, too. PSP and Vita games were not easy to buy in most regions in recent years, anyway. And none of this is, again, considering the gamut of digital-only releases on these platforms, something the PS Vita’s community mostly lived on. Or updates that would fix or otherwise enhance the game.
Abandoning the Legacy
This decision is, no doubt, one that comes from the top - even if not from Jim Ryan directly. I’m sure there is an argument to be made about server upkeep, database bloat, yada yada - but it’s still a problematic one. They already cut off PSN access on the physical Playstation Portable consoles themselves, leaving users to use their PS3 as a download hub for these games.
Jim Ryan may not have made this specific call himself - though he very well may have - but there’s little doubt that his philosophies have influenced the direction the Playstation brand has headed in, one which should upset gamers anywhere.
You see, Playstation used to be the brand about the games. They’ve had their fair share of stumbles and pitfalls as any megacorporation does, but what has appealed to me about the Playstation since I was a toddler, was the emphasis on bringing cool games to your home. Innovating and focusing on fun. Graphics wars were always a thing in the console competition, but Sony wore their unique and niche games like a badge of honor, even when they weren’t the best-looking or the most successful.
Here’s a clip of an E3 introduction given by the at-the-time freshly promoted Sony Interactive Entertainment head Shawn Layden in 2014:
[Shawn Layden Vib Ribbon E3 bit]
This is the CEO of the company saying: “It wasn't a multi-million seller, but that wasn't the point.” It was about the games. Granted, this specific bit led into a Mortal Kombat introduction and thus wasn’t received very well due to the teasing nature about a game the US had never actually received a localization of during the PS1’s lifetime. He then used that momentum to deliver that very game to gamers, starting the same day as that E3 presentation, and made it available on the Playstation 3 and PS Vita. Layden would go on to similarly be the “gamer’s friend” in later years, repping franchises like Crash Bandicoot. Unfortunately, his tenure as the head of Sony’s gaming division was short-lived, with a massive restructuring of the company happening in 2019 and Jim Ryan replaced him as President and CEO.
We went from having someone who cared about making cool games and delivering cool experiences to players to… someone who thus far has seemed less than interested in focusing on this.
In an interview with GQ from November of 2020, Ryan states that his role with a new console generation is to weigh in on the commercial viability of certain ideas. And boy has he done that.
Back in 2017, when Ryan was the Global Head of Sales and Marketing for Sony, he told Time Magazine:
[Ice] “When we’ve dabbled with backwards compatibility, I can say it is one of those features that is much requested, but not actually used much,”.
My issue with this right out of the gate, before we even get to the punchline which is a separate quote, is the minimizing of Playstation’s legacy of backwards compatibility. Prior to the Playstation 4, Playstation was THE example for backwards compatibility for DECADES. They didn’t just “dabble” in it - they set a bar that rarely could any other company live up to.
The Playstation 2 integrated the original Playstation’s core components (using them for DVD playback and other functions when not playing PS1 games) for near-perfect PS1 backwards compatibility, not only with the games but with memory cards, controllers, and accessories. Only the PS2 Slim had issues playing certain PS1 games on its revised hardware. The PS3 - with its massive price tag - launched with a full PS2 baked in, giving it hardware-level backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games, even selling accessories to import your memory card save files to the new console to keep playing. They had to later add functionality specific to certain game requirements - like the ability to virtually change your PS3 controller’s “port” for situations like the Psycho Mantis fight from Metal Gear Solid. The console had some customization of the video output for these older games, making the launch PS3 an absolute powerhouse that could play THREE generations of games on one machine.
Now… this system suffered for it. Firstly, it cost Sony too much and they were losing money per unit sold, despite the high price tag. The first revision removed some of the original hardware but introduced a software emulator to keep playing PS2 games on the system, from disc, so gamers receiving replacements for their Yellow Light of Death systems wouldn’t have to skip a beat. Later, they had to alter the hardware enough that this emulator would not be supported on future consoles. They did it in the first place though, and that mattered.
But Sony didn’t let that stop them anyway. The new, more stable and long-living consoles could still play all PS1 games directly from disc, and Sony introduced the PS Classics section of the PS3’s game store, allowing gamers to download and play over 250 PS1 games and over 330 PS2 games on their PS3 systems - though this time requiring an additional purchase rather than just slotting the disc in. This was a far cry from the near 8,000 games released for the PS1 and over 4,400 games released for the PS2 overall, but it was a great program, regardless.
Sony also had similar PS1 Classics available for the Playstation Portable - and thus the PS Vita through its backwards compatibility with PSP games, as well.
It didn’t stop there, the PS3 console saw 60 or so full “HD Collection” releases, porting games from other platforms, such as with Sonic Adventure HD, or collecting older Playstation releases and making them playable from a single disc on PS3, such as with the Devil May Cry and Metal Gear Solid HD collections, as well as the God of War Collections which not only brought the first 2 God of War titles from PS2 to the new console, but also ported two PSP-exclusive God of War titles to the PS3 system, as well.
Playstation hadn’t just dabbled with backwards compatibility, they owned it.
Let’s continue Ryan’s quote:
[Ice] “That, and I was at a Gran Turismo event recently where they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, and the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?”
[StarStream]
As Lance McDonald put it, here Jim Ryan sounds like your 12-year-old cousin who only plays Call of Duty or Fortnite and takes a dump on Minecraft for looking old and like a kids game.
The audacity to talk about an event dedicated to the celebration of a specific game franchise and dunk on people enjoying the older titles in a long-running, beloved franchise is already wild enough, but to do so specifically based on graphics is genuinely upsetting. He may not have been President or CEO of the company at the time, but he was still in charge of their marketing, and became President and CEO only a couple short years later.
It’s at this point that I have some questions about whether Ryan has even played video games. Of course he has, he’s been with Sony and Playstation since the ‘90s - but honestly that makes this even more confusing. Well, only kinda.
I would fairly easily believe that these aren’t actually Ryan’s feelings on the matter. I bet there are quite a few games released during his tenure at the gaming giant that are near and dear to his heart which don’t have top-tier, modernized graphics. But admitting this isn’t convenient for the direction he wants the company to go in. He’s navigated the company in the direction of focusing only on the latest and greatest, and the most visually-impressive, even dropping Japan Studio to virtually everyone’s dismay - and continuing the rhetoric that old games suck and you only need new games helps justify those kinds of decisions, along with the decision now to cut off games from older systems and wreak havoc on game preservation.
Appreciating the Past
Playstation’s own lineage is full of games deserving of appreciation and preservation - many or most of which don’t have amazing graphics by modern standards.
Names like Katamari, Tekken, Wipeout, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, The Legend of Dragoon, Metal Gear Solid, Ape Escape, Dino Crisis, Syphon Filter, Tomb Raider, Twisted Metal - countless names bring back feelings of nostalgia and comfort - many of which still hold up to this day and are perfectly enjoyable as-is. Others, like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot have even received loving remakes on newer Playstation systems thanks to fan demand (and maybe a little help from Shawn Layden) even though they never had all that impressive visuals for the time. Often, it is the games who chose more simplistic and less flashy art direction who survive the test of time, while plenty of games which seemed amazing-looking at the time, hold up far worse.
There are older games which truly had impressive visuals in some form or another. Be it a unique approach to working within the limits of a given console, or through putting more effort in than most games typically do. Another example of this is the motion capture work in Clock Tower 3, as identified by Lance. For more content about this, I recommend checking out the GameHut YouTube channel, ran by a former game dev, as well as John Linneman’s DF Retro series.
If nothing else, Nintendo’s entire existence is more or less predicated on games that don’t have super impressive visuals, and you can’t argue with the numbers there.
Video Games is a wonderful medium for immersive worlds, incredible storytelling, a safe place to escape to, addicting mechanics and gameplay, and characters that you can relate to or care about. Booting up a console should bring forward happy memories of a cozy rainy day, a Saturday morning marathon, teaming up with buddies on the couch, the easter eggs or glitches you shared at school or on forums, or kicking ass at LAN parties. When you focus on enjoying the games you’re playing and the experiences they can provide to you, you can truly enjoy the medium for what it is, and the resolution of the textures or polygon counts, or framerate in raytracing mode really falls away. Perhaps Jim Ryan has forgotten what the joy of gaming is really all about.
Hell, part of Sony still even saw value in these older Gran Turismo games, as some of them got ported to PS4 with Trophy support and everything.
The PS3 itself has a massive library of great games you could enjoy today - though not as many as the PS2 and PS1 before it. I actually covered many of these games in a video back in 2017 where I talked about the urgency of buying a PS3 game console before prices soared, as the PS3 was ending production at the time.
Let that sink in, as well - they stopped manufacturing the Playstation 3 just a mere 4 years ago, and they’re already cutting off access to the game stores and updates for it. The system still received new game releases last year, in 2020. That may very well be unprecedented - if we don’t count outright failed consoles like the Ouya.
Meanwhile the Playstation 2, having originally released in the year 2000, was still being produced up until 2013, with games still being released for the system that year. Clearly this was a specific, big shift for the company’s philosophy, even if we didn’t know it at the time.
What We’re Losing
The shutdown of these game stores means the loss of access to a significant number of games, not just PS3 games. PSP games have only been downloadable via the PS3 for a couple years now - and good luck finding those physically. Meanwhile the PS Vita, a system with a complicated launch, but a dedicated cult following, enjoyed a wide library of digital-only games, with the only physical releases coming from Limited Run Games for a long time. And there’s also the PSP Go and the PS TV - both of which only play downloaded games.
While the Playstation 3 didn’t get a fancy “XBOX Live Arcade” equivalent program, there were a number of download-only PSN games for the system.
Tokyo Jungle, The House of the Dead 4, Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty should be names that anyone looking up which games to download have come across.
BlackLight: Tango Down was an incredible multiplayer shooter released in 2010 that enjoyed a lovely marketing push from the Machinima Respawn crew along with many others who needed a break from Call of Duty while still wanting the same kind of action. Some reviews at the time hailed it as the “best downloadable game at this point in time.” It was later de-listed and replaced with “Blacklight: Retribution” but the magic was never replicated.
Puzzle games like Echochrome and Lumines Supernova were great breaks from the big-budget releases of the time, Savage Moon was a lovely tower defense game.
Other digital-only PS3 titles include Bomberman Ultra, Calling All Cars!, Crash Commando, Galaga Legions & Legions DX, MotorStorm RC, Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee HD, Tetris HD, Trash Panic, Hyperballoid HD, LocoRoco Cocoreccho!, Magic Orbz, various PixelJunk games, Ricochet HD, Spelunker HD, Ace Combat Infinity, Dark Mist, and of course, the Rocket League precursor: Super Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars. Which everyone should play.
This isn’t even mentioning the PS3 exclusives that also had physical copies but haven’t been made playable on other platforms, such as Disgaea 3 and 4, Katamari Forever, Fat Princess, quite a few Atelier games, most of the God of War franchise, Gran Turismo 5 and 6, Heavenly Sword - PLEASE give us a remake, Killzone 1 2 and 3, the Metal Gear Solid franchise in general, Ninja Gaidan Sigma 1 and 2, multiple MotorStorm games, many Ratchet & Clank Future games, Starhawk, Tekken Hybrid, Twisted Metal, Lair, and so on.
There’s games like 3D Dot Game Heroes which never released on any other platform - despite the engine being ported to the Vita - which the My Life in Gaming crowd is currently advocating to be brought to Switch, which I can certainly agree with.
There’s also likely a multitude of games like LittleBigPlanet 1, 2, and Karting where the game effectively becomes unplayable because all of the community content you downloaded for it requires internet access to play.
There’s a couple InFAMOUS titles still stuck on the PS3. While Shadow of the Colossus got a full PS4 remake, Ico got a HD port paired with Shadow for the PS3 that has never left the system.
There’s even more than this, plus a whole slew of these games in Japan, I’ll have a comprehensive list linked in the video description.
Unfortunately there are also games like Blacklight which have basically become unplayable over time, as well, including MAG - which had wonderful massive-scale online multiplayer unlike anything we’ve still ever really seen - and SOCOM: Confrontation. I’d love to play MAG again.
Some PS3 games are playable via PS Now, but not many and you can’t bring your saves or downloaded content forward to the service.
This becomes really ridiculous when you consider the fact that so many modern games and franchises are built from games that released on older systems.
There’s still two more consoles being cut off here: PS1 and PS2. While the Classics releases on PS3 didn’t even begin to cover the entire libraries of the respective systems, it did allow gamers to purchase otherwise inaccessible games like The Misadventures of Tron Bonne - which sells for well over a thousand US dollars on the used market right now, with disc-only listing over 300 dollars. Defying all reason, logic, and consumer expectation, Sony has never developed a full, proper PS1 or PS2 emulator for the Playstation 4, nor the new Playstation 5 console, and allowed gamers to bring their already-purchased library of classics forward. Despite the fact that the new systems would easily handle emulating the older consoles and even be able to enhance the experience. You won’t be able to buy them digitally, you won’t be able to download the ones you’ve bought again, and the physical prices will continue to increase.
I wanted to briefly note that you can currently play a small handful of PS3 games on their game streaming service, PS Now. You can’t import your saves or anything, and it was a fight to make this happen - primarily motivated by games like Metal Gear Solid 4 which don’t exist on any other platform and aren’t easy to emulate - but it’s almost a guarantee that this part of the service will be phased out. The PS3 games on PS Now run on actual PS3 hardware, this change to the wider services will certainly trickle down back to PS Now. There are already games on there that don’t fully work due to services for them being shut down, it’s inevitable that Sony will just drop them outright.
More Problems Lie Ahead
You might have followed along so far and thought “well that sucks but I guess I’ll drop a bunch of money here in Q2 on PSN games before they go away”. I did too, even though we have very little warning compared to Nintendo’s over a year in advance notice of shutting down the Wii shop. One small problem: This may not save your games. It turns out, the way DRM works for PSN content, your systems internal clock has to stay in sync. If it falls out of sync, the content de-activates until you can re-activate it with PSN. You know, the PSN that you’ll likely lose access to once this change happens.
There is a CR2032 battery in the console called the “PRAM battery” which will need replaced over time, and doing so will reset the internal clock and require validation from the Playstation network to sync back up.
Replacing your battery now could buy you some more time with your activated games, but that’s still much more limited times than it should be. With there being no way to acquire this content elsewhere, and no alteration of Sony’s licensing policy in sight, these games will become inaccessible quicker than you might imagine.
This is also a huge problem for games preservation. The preservation scene has always been at odds with games publishers due to habits of tossing out old work and making things inaccessible that most of them have done over the decades, but the promise was that digital was forever.
In fact, that very argument was the basis for pushback against the ESA’s fight for copyright exemptions in the name of game preservation - because “digital means you can always access it.” We learn time, after time, after time that this is simply not the case.
[Voultar quote]
To learn more about game preservation and the efforts involved, I highly recommend checking out the latest episode of My Life in Gaming’s “Analog Frontiers” documentary series. Watch the whole series, but definitely check out the latest third episode.
Unfortunately, this is the exact scenario which forces would-be consumers into piracy. And then Sony will scratch their heads wondering “why are people pirating our games?” and the cycle continues. Piracy from people who would have bought the product is indicative of a service problem.
I somewhat predicted that the PS3’s online life would not go too much further and last year gave my ol’ PS3 Slim some upgrades. I gave it a 1TB internal SSD (doesn’t really help load times but helps with navigating through a lot of data more quickly) and a 2TB external USB HDD, and jailbroke it or soft-modded it with custom firmware. I downloaded every title and DLC to my account - even for games I didn’t yet had, and prepared to start loading homebrew. The process is quite simple these days, unless you have the “Super Slim” variant of the console, and I highly recommend checking out my buddy MrMario’s guides on this subject for more information.
Of course, the PS3 emulator RPCS3 is becoming more viable over time, but it’s much more difficult to obtain download-only content for it, rather than ripping your own disc games, and it’s still not a suitable replacement for everyone. Get subscribed for a video on the suitability of PS3 emulation soon.
The Competition
Somehow, as Sony’s focus on preserving games and backwards compatibility has dwindled - no doubt a luxury they have as they have risen to the top of the console food chain - Xbox’s has only grown and gotten better.
In case you missed it, starting in 2017 Xbox has made MASSIVE investments and efforts into backwards compatibility. They’ve included dedicated hardware on the Xbox One and Series consoles for this purpose, and have build a program to enable games from the original Xbox and Xbox 360 to run on the newer consoles AND many of them get a fairly substantial upgrade in performance - seeing both framerate and resolution increases. They’ve even been developing tech to squeeze higher framerates out of older games which were engine-locked to 30FPS, and to automatically upconvert SDR games to HDR. Plus, Xbox has kinda forgone the “generational” aspect of consoles and virtually all games released today work on both Xbox One and Series consoles. You buy it once and you Play Anywhere. The Play Anywhere program also allowing for simultaneous release of Xbox exclusives on both Xbox consoles and PC now. Really, it’s fascinating to see.
And while obviously the backwards compatibility catalog isn’t complete yet - though I do expect they will release a less-enhanced general purpose BC emulator at some point - Xbox is outright embracing this philosophy. The Backwards Compatibility tech lets you pop in any game disc - be it a DVD from the original Xbox or Xbox 360, or Xbox One BluRays and play the game directly. You have to download the patched backwards compatible version, but you’re still able to use your original copies of the games - or cheaper used copies you’ve been able to find. And as Modern Vintage Gamer has shown a few times, System Link can work across all the generations of Xboxes! It’s wild.
And then you have their careful approach to remastering. It didn’t start that way, the Master Chief Collection of Halo games launched in a pretty pathetic state, but since then the game has received a complete overhaul, additional games, 4K 120hz support, and all sorts of magic injected in. There’s also the Gears of War remaster with the other games having BackCompat support. You might think that the remastered games would limit which games get backwards compatibility support - but that hasn’t been true so far. Halo 3 on Xbox 360 got a major backwards compatibility update allowing it to run at 4k on newer Xboxes and is a wonderful point of comparison - while also letting you play the original multiplayer modes, albeit with the much worse netcode and dead playerbase since MCC is the superior version now.
Don’t like the newest Call of Duty title? Fire up the original Black Ops on your new Xbox and continue your profile where you left off.
The Xbox Series X truly lives up to the dream I had when buying my PS3 Slim (not realizing it no longer had backwards compatibility) of replacing multiple generations of consoles. I can put discs from the original Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One and new Xbox Series games in and play away. It’s awesome.
The truth is, backwards compatibility doesn’t need to be as over-the-top as Xbox makes it. Just getting your games playable across hardware generations is enough. We don’t need every PS1, PS2, and PS3 game to run on PS4 and PS5 at 4K 120fps or whatever - we just want it to run. There are obvious difficulties making PS3 games work on other platforms, but Sony just hasn’t put in any effort.
In an interview with Geek Culture for the Playstation 5 launch, Jim Ryan said “Our ambition is always quite simple; we want to make the PlayStation community happy.” But really, who is delivering what makes gamers happy in the long-term here?
Of course, Xbox and Microsoft are another gigantic megacorp who have shareholders who could care less about what gamers want, and no one is a “good guy” in consumerism - but I believe we should applaud the good where we see it and use our wallets accordingly. I want to see Phil Spencer continue leading Xbox in the direction that all games companies should head in.
Conclusion
As I finished scripting this video about a subject that I clearly care a lot about, I started to wonder: “What do I actually want to get from this video?” Realistically, I don’t think there’s any saving this move on the PS3, PSP or PS Vita stores. Too many steps have been made - including restricting access to purchase these games to the PS3 and PS Vita systems themselves back in Fall of 2020. I honestly thought this was a frustrating enough choice at the time, as the PS3 had moved to a web store instead of native integration many years ago, and was a sluggish frustrating experience as a result. But if it was just loading the website anyway, why not let us do so on a faster computer? Because apparently they didn’t want us to access it at all anymore.
But the ramifications that this move has, not only for game preservation of these older, now retro games, but also for future console generations. This is very alarming given how more and more reliant newer consoles are becoming on always-online syncing and such. This PRAM issue affects the PlayStation 4, but worse: as a lost sync with the online services can also mean games can’t even be read from disc. Not to mention that virtually every game released for the newer systems has a giant day 1 patch that changes or fixes a lot of things that you don’t want to be stuck without in… most cases. This presumably affects the PS5 as well.
Obviously, some degree of lobbying needs done to ensure that future console generations don’t share the same fate as previous ones, but honestly I think we need to push for Sony to go back and update their licensing policies and institute a basic access to the online services for these older systems to allow people to access their content. This has to be a deliberate philosophical shift for the company or we’ll never see any real progress.
Not only that, but our purchases need unified in our PlayStation Network accounts and PS1 and PS2 emulators added to the newer systems where we can download those games we bought before (and still buy the other listings) and continue playing them. I really don’t see any excuse for why this isn’t the case already.
I don’t have much more for you. Oh wait, yes I do.
Hey Jim Ryan: SCREW YOU.
Hit the like button if you enjoyed, subscribe for more tech education. I’m your stream professor EposVox and I’ll see you next time.
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