Due To The Protests, The PS5 Event Was Delayed (Gamers, Please Calm Down)
Gamers can be an unreasonable lot. Even if you subtract the racists, the woman-haters, and the homophobes, there are the ones who can't imagine that the announcement of a video game isn't the most important thing in the world. Sony was all set to announce their new slate of PS5 games during a big event this Thursday, the 12th, but it was postponed because Sony read the room and realized now's not the best time for a bunch of video game commercials:
Kotaku pointed out that Japanese gamers seem to be just fine waiting. Except their chill vibes in the face of disappointing, but ultimately frivolous, pop culture news stands in direct contrast to the replies under Sony's tweet announcing the postponement, and in the comments of every article that reported the news. Here's just a small sampling of the replies. For every "I'm disappointed, but I respect the decision" there are a handful of entitled gamer rage tweets like ...
"After months of waiting for a reveal you just made me lose interest in the ps5, way ago what's going on in America doesn't even effect the rest of the world yet again america has to make it all about them."
"No that's it i want an Xbox been loyal to ps for 11 years and now I want an Xbox because of one event that has now seen the murderer get charged but nope life can't go on it has to stop guess the left win again."
"PlayStation is the important thing right now, we want to see"
And that's the tamer stuff that wasn't removed by Twitter between the news breaking yesterday and publication of this article.
I'd argue that not holding an hour-long commercial for upcoming video games releases is just the respectful thing to do as the U.S. and several other countries protest the brutality committed by militarized police forces all over the world. But again, some illogical gamers have brains that are permanently stuck in the primordial soup stage of evolutionary development. Doing the good thing makes no sense to people who still, in 2020, willingly divided themselves along console lines and hate the other side as if most games won't show up on both consoles. So, I hate to try to explain this with "fact" and "evidence", knowing even that won't work. But here we go.
Sony might be a Japanese company, but the U.S. is the Playstation's biggest market by an enormous margin. U.S. PS4 sales account for nearly 30-percent of all global sales, having sold around 30 million units. The next closest is Japan at 8.3 million, then Germany at 7.2 and the U.K. at 6.8. Combine them, and they still don't match the U.S.'s market share. If there are coast-to-coast protests taking up people's attention in their biggest sales market, Sony will do the smart thing and postpone their giant commercial until the pepper spray has worn off enough that people can see the snazzy graphical fidelity of next-gen consoles. Folks will be able to better appreciate the crazy new advancements in the real-time fully dynamic lighting of film-quality high-resolution environmental assets after angry cops, armored like a final boss, are done trying to beat people with batons for committing the sin of existing while black.
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Top Image: Sony