PlayStation's Creative Slump: Wolverine Flops, Kojima Ties Cut

PlayStation is losing to itself this week, and Xbox does not even have to show up to collect the point.

I will give the critics this much, because a fan who only cheers is not a fan worth listening to: Marvel's Wolverine landed with a sub-80 Metacritic average, and in the triple-A space that number is treated as a genuine disaster. As IGN lays out in PlayStation's Creative Future Has Never Looked Bleaker, that miss does not sit alone. It sits inside a stretch where PlayStation Studios has struggled to produce the kind of single-player swing that made the brand worth defending in the first place.

Then there is the Kojima situation. IGN's channel reports that Sony is cutting ties with the man who built Metal Gear Solid in 1998, the game that basically wrote the syllabus for what a PlayStation exclusive could be. IGN's argument, and I cannot find much daylight to argue into, is that the platform needs its next evolutionary leap in traditional game design more badly than it has in years, and walking away from the one designer who has repeatedly delivered exactly that is a strange time to do it.

So what does PlayStation do next? Improvise.

That is not a compliment. A platform with this much hardware muscle and this much first-party history should not be relying on improvisation to fill a creative gap this wide. I still trust the studio slate more than I trust whatever roadmap slide Xbox is presenting this quarter, and that is not nothing. But trust is not the same as results, and right now the results are a middling superhero game and a designer walking out the door at the worst possible moment.