Délice De France

At Paris Games Week, violence takes the shine off Sony’s push for the massmarket

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There is, in fairness, no way to perfectly time a live show when it’s being broadcast around the world. Yet that is no excuse for Sony’s Paris Games Week show – which kicked off at 5pm local time, and as such was always likely to be watched by school-age children in the event’s home region – being quite so extreme in its content. First, David Cage’s Detroit: Become Human was shown off, if you can call it that, in a scene depicting violent child abuse. Later, in the show-closing headline slot, a sequence from The Last Of Us II showed arms, heads and jaws split apart by hammers. Yes, the watershed means nothing when you’re working across timezones. But these were thoroughly inappropriate displays of two hotly anticipated games, atleast one of which has no need to court controversy.

Word at the show was that the US PlayStation team had muscled in on an event that normally belonged to the European division, the gang across the pond unable to resist a chance to disrupt Microsoft’s news cycle a week before the release of Xbox One X. And perhaps, with the mood over there growing darker by the day thanks to Trump, fascism, racism, mass shootings and all the rest of it, PlayStation US thought, well, stuff it. The sky is falling in. Might as well get out the hammers.