Sad news has come to light for the PlayStation fandom. Shawn Layden, president of PlayStations Worldwide Studios, confirmed on the PlayStation BlogCast that there will be no PlayStation Experience event in 2018. His remarks are as follows:
For 2018, I know this is going to be a disappointment to some people, but we decided to not hold PlayStation Experience this year.ย We won’t have it in the States this year. The reasons behind that really are we don’t have…we have a lot of progress that we’re making on our games…Now that we have Spider-Man out the door, we’re looking down into 2019 games like Dreams and Days Gone. But we wouldn’t have enough to bring people all together in some location North America to have that event. We don’t want to set expectations really high and then not deliver on that. It was a hard decision, but we have determined that this year we will not hold PlayStation Experience.
This is a surprising but understandable move for PlayStation. Over the last few PlayStation Experiences, Sony has put less emphasis on its importance. Last year, Sony opted to hold a smaller, more intimate press conference, choosing to instead put all their stock in Paris Games Week.
While some fans still enjoyed the insider access to hearing developers talk about PlayStation, some felt that it was underwhelming. The show will be missed, and it is yet to be confirmed if Sony will make an appearance at Paris Games Week as they did last year.
In the meantime, Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller announced that they will be holding a press conference for developers in Sony’s stead. Interest from developers can be clearly seen on twitter from the likes of Housmarque (Resogun, Super Stardust) and Team Meat (Super Meat Boy). Hopefully, with The Game Awards handling large game reveals and Kinda Funny’s conference giving the spotlight to indies, gaming fans will not be short on exciting game announcements at the end of the year.
