They always indeed get a pass and I’m frankly tired of hearing bad-faith/self-delusional arguments to the contrary. Again, let’s look at Ryan McCaffrey, IGN at large, Gamespot, GamesRadar, Eurogamer, and literally any non-Xbox specific gaming site and compare their coverage to just the cross-gen announcement by Xbox to the recent Sony turn, despite the latter being borne of lies and deception for months. When you expand to more than just that singular point it becomes blatantly obvious and I’d be happy to give plenty of direct, verifiable examples.
This isn’t about being an Xbox warrior or being an anti-Sony person, it’s simply about the expectation (albeit perhaps a naive one) of our gaming media being at least somewhat objective and holding everyone to equal account. Hell, I know that many of us want the same from media beyond just gaming, but gaming should be one of the easiest to be truthful and objective.
Nothing about the stand or the SSD bay or even the cooling solution is all that ‘smart’ tbh. Those are the required concessions they got forced to make in order to properly cool their overclocked SoC. Had they gone wide instead of narrow, they would have not had to deal with these concessions at all.
The stand is needed, because of the design. They could’ve used a totally different one with same performance metrics. So they needed to come up with a solution.
A transformative stand that has a nice place for the screw is smart. Definitely smarter than including 2 stands where one would be wasted production depending on the orientation you put your console.
I’m trying to come at it from the other side to be devils advocate and I guess I’d say…
The media may well in many cases personally prefer the Playstation. I think much of this comes from a) much US mainstream games media have a weird fascination with Japanese culture - and therefore gravitate towards Sony. b) Much of the US mainstream games media grew up in an era where in the tech world MS was the bad guys and only did business stuff and what they did was aggressive and screwed over everyone else. So there’s a natural bias. I see this MAINLY in the US gaming media. Less so over here in the UK - but still a little bit.
But I don’t think the gaming media is deliberately writing stuff or planning how to help Sony I think its just individual personal things that creep in subconsciously.
I also think many of the people who post about gaming online are in the 30-50 age range. And many of these people hark back to the PS1 and 2 days - many before this but they want their gaming history remembered - Sony provides that, whereas MS just doesn’t go back as far in pure video gaming terms. So Sony is nostalgic and whatever - listening to Giant Bomb the other day they all said how great it was that Sony did that weird hardware reveal in Japan as it was just like the old days where Japan found out everything first. It was a genuine sentiment. Baffled me but I don’t think its anything other than their genuine feeling.
Because of this I think the sub conscious reaction is to downplay any issue PS has and yet to attack any issue Xbox has - its connected to all those historical things and individual feelings and whatever.
I didn’t really start console gaming till the OG xbox for Halo before then I was mainly PC. And I’m 40. So I think that’s why I have no association with Sony at all. As a teen the only real console I had was Sega Mega drive - and my guess is if Sega were still making console hardware they would bring out the same feelings in me as Sony do . And I’d probably be buying 3 PS5’s…
I don’t see anything particular smart there. Any undergrad engineering student would come up with exactly the same thing, if not a better design (magnets, not having the weird curvy contours in the first place to name two easy ones). I’ve judged competitions in the freshmen engineering courses I taught in the past that had more novel solutions to similar challenges. Like, the most novel design choice in the stand is to hide a screw…a screw that isn’t visible at all when the stand is in use anyhow!
The only reason there is a stand at all is due to Sony’s design team wanting to break up the wide surfaces on the side aesthetically since it looks dull without it. Had they not gone that route, they could have flat surfaces that can easily work for supporting the consoles without any stand.
Even with the current stand, they could have had a simple channel for the console to slide into to secure it, or added a simple rotation mechanism to lock it into place, or had the stand itself split in 2 and the two halves lock together. These would all provide the same support without making users break out a screwdriver just to change the orientation.
This is very well-put. I feel the same general ambivalence about Sony the way you do. For me, it was always about Nintendo and Sony was just kind of there as a reasonable supplement from PS2 onwards. These days, I’m not as enthused about Nintendo but pound for pound, nothing this gen has grabbed me the same way Breath of the Wild has, so they can still knock my socks off.
Don’t know about reeling, but certainly chuckling. I have worked on a lot of things, and some of it I’m very proud of (have 20+ granted patents), but adding a screw and clamp to the stand whilst very practical, I don’t think if I would add it to my resume as work of brilliance.
I didn’t mean like that. I just mean a lot of the people in the gaming media grew up with playstation and idolising this cool Japanese company who were letting them play games on their TV and watch films on it…its nostalgia and natural for them to feel comfortable with Sony - and not with Xbox. I can clearly outline why I don’t feel like that. But I guess the majority do…I’m just putting a hypothesis out there for why Sony are often given an easier ride.
It sounds like you have a lot to be proud of! To be clear, I’m not knocking the concept of the stand, I’m just baffled by the lovingly-written tribute to it that Polygon saw fit to publish.
I should make it make it very clear that I am also not knocking the screw and clamp used, the engineer made good decision. My comment is really wrt the journalists and article which cheapens the language and importance of words. If we are talking about brilliance, lets talk about Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier who this week won the Nobel prize. Lets not cheapen the language, and make adjectives meaningless.
Yes GDK will let you do that. But it is also true that GDK is not as mature as XDK yet. You as a dev have both options available but for the short time horizon I suppose you will have better results with XDK just yet.
I mean, I completely agree with you that the nostalgia of growing up playing the Playstation is a huge factor of this double standard that we see in the media as general. Im at 40 too and started console gaming as a hobby with the 360 (had an atari, snes and mega drive back in the day), so I also don’t have any bounds with Sony. So yeah, this could very well be a factor.
However, we are talking about grown up men and women and professionals journalists and or editors, and this is worrisome for me that they can’t let their nostalgy feelings behind to actually do their job properly with a minimum of objectivity.
It is like that article on Kotaku complaining they were not ready for the size of the SX, but it seems they are ok with the significant bigger Ps5. As primarily Xbox player and having played this entire gen on a Xbox One, I grew some thick skin on it, but still find extremely unethical that’s such double standards exists.
When they are doing their work they should just be unbiased and put aside any nostalgia or emotional connections that they supposedly had with anything else. We are talking about adults and professionals - though many of them aren’t acting like that.
By the way, this is the expected behavior for a lot of other professional areas - on sport, for instance.
Comments about media bias aside, I just can’t fathom as an adult (and a professional) writing about a piece of plastic and a screw and claiming that it’s an example of “Design Brilliance”. It would just be so exceedingly stupid to put that out there and then assume people will ever take anything I say seriously again.
Regardless of what’s actually written in that article (I’m not going to read it), that headline is beyond ridiculous.
yeah, I think it is a cronical issue on jornalism, whatever the area, but in gaming it is just ridiculously clear, and then we see the credibility crysis that journalism is facing in recent days. That is dangerous imo, when you lost credibility and objectivity, it opens up get to your news anywhere else, like social media, which is full of bad intentioned ppl as well. Just like the recent example of SX overheating fake news.
Yes, absolutely! CRISPR has the potential to change the trajectory of the entire human species, it’s orders of magnitudes above a neat stand.
I appreciate the clarification, thanks for letting me know! I hope that in time, this means more games will be developed for Xbox because it’s all one big userbase and it makes more sense to include the whole enchilada.
I read it to see if it was satire but I don’t think it was…
