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For the last several years Sony has consistently held its PlayStation Experience near the end of the year. It's a good way to round out the previous 12 months with a snazzy look at upcoming PlayStation exclusives, or to recap some of the recently released hits. Sony usually sets things for December after the Paris Games Week, and has used the PlayStation Experience in the past to highlight some of the upcoming games for the PS4. This year, however, there won't be a PlayStation Experience, and Sony has an explanation for why it won't be holding the event for 2018.
The news was rolled out through a podcast on the PlayStation Blog. Surprisingly, it did not receive it's very own news release, which is typical with a big announcement like this. Instead, Sony's worldwide studios chairman Shawn Layden popped onto the podcast to explain why there will be no PlayStation Experience this year, saying:
Now that we have Spider-Man out the door, we're looking down in 2019 to games like Dreams and Days Gone, but we wouldn't have enough to bring people together in some location in North America to have that event. We don't want to set expectations really high and then not deliver on it.
So in other words, there aren't enough attention-grabbing games to justify hosting a full PlayStation Experience event. Sure, Sony could showcase Dreams and Days Gone, but beyond that, it doesn't sound like there is enough content to convince anyone to bring the event back.
I know some people are probably thinking about The Last of Us Part II, hoping to see more gameplay or possibly a new cinematic sequence, but it doesn't sound as if Naughty Dog is in a position to showcase any new content. Last year the developers gave gamers a rather gruesome look at the zombie-survival drama via a shocking trailer at PSX, introducing gamers to some of the new characters that will appear in the game.
The lack of a Playstation Experience this year also likely means that games like Dreams and Days Gone will be moving into the final stages of development soon. As such, Sony likely wants to focus on getting those titles perfected and out of the door, instead of setting up promotional and marketing events for the games.
Days Gone is sort of like a mix between Sons of Anarchy and World War Z, and the developers have been working hard to finish up the open-world, multi-choice action game for a PS4 launch in February of 2019. While the game won't be showcased at the PlayStation Experience this year -- since there won't be one -- it could also mean that Sony's next slew of games may not be for the PlayStation 4.
It would make some sense for Sony's next big outing to focus on games for a totally new game console. Alternatively, maybe Sony just exhausted all of its exclusives for now, and has nothing new to show or announce. In the interim, PlayStation gamers still have Marvel's Spider-Man to play through, and both Days Gone and Dreams to play on the horizon.