Sony Confirms They’re Skipping Tokyo Game Show

As we enter the month of September, Japanese game developers prepare for Japan’s version of E3, Tokyo Game Show. Tokyo Game Show is an expo that lasts for multiple days out of a week, with the latter half being open to the public to experience upcoming titles.  In the past, Tokyo Game Show was important in its own way, as it often contained plenty of announcements for upcoming titles.  However, as gaming began to become more mobile-focused in Japan, the titles available to show off gradually became less impressive.   It’s been something of an up and down for Tokyo Game Show this generation, with Sony occasionally providing amazing shows but generally providing mediocre, or even boring ones.
But that won’t be a concern this year, as Sony has admitted they won’t be showing up with a press conference at all, instead choosing to simply display games on the show floor.  This comes after Sony not only canceled their own “PlayStation Experience” conference last year, but decided to skip E3 this year as well.
This is actually especially shocking, considering their last showing during Tokyo Game Show happened to be substantially better than their E3.  Featuring a ton of interesting, new third-party titles that were mostly coming only to PlayStation 4, it felt like a lock that we would see another conference like that this year, especially as Japan gradually starts to come back to console gaming, thanks to the worldwide popularity of their games, as well as the domestic (and global!) popularity of the Nintendo Switch.
With this information, it’s basically confirmed that Sony will remain silent for the remainder of the year (aside from potential “State of Play” releases). Though seemed obvious in the aftermath of their 2016 E3 that they had shown off a lot of games with increasingly nebulous release dates, it mostly seemed to only increase the belief that even more games would be coming later on.  Instead, it seems what happened then is Sony got ahead of themselves, announcing games that wouldn’t be seen until 2018, or even later in the case of something like Death Stranding.   Because of that, they’ve spent all of their major titles for this console generation.
With games taking more and more time in the oven thanks to HD and 4K, Sony was going to have to begin on PlayStation 5 titles sooner or later, and it appears that work has begun.  Unless they decide to jump the gun and announce yet another PlayStation Experience this December, expect the next time we see Sony and their people on the big stage to happen in early 2020.  The PlayStation 4 launch was a nearly perfect experience, so likely they won’t stray too far.
In the meantime, we’ll be discussing plenty of other Tokyo Game Show titles next week. Though Sony might have already stopped working on even more new games for their consoles, plenty of other developers haven’t.