In case you’ve been living under a rock, yesterday saw the first major promotional event for the PlayStation 5. Held in lieu of the coronavirus-induced cancellation of E3 a few months ago, Sony’s digital alternative featured various studios offering trailers, screenshots and news updates on upcoming projects made exclusively for the next generation of consoles.
If you ask the average gamer what they thought of the event, they’ll probably go on a confusing yet excited tangent about games like Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales or Resident Evil 8. While burning through all the good stuff that got announced in such a short time frame, however, few will probably ponder Sony’s new slogan for their next bit of hardware.
And that’s kind of a shame, because slogans can reveal a lot about what a company is trying to achieve with a certain product, and how they want their customers to conceptualize it in their minds. According to Sony representatives, then, the official slogan for the PlayStation 5 will be: Play Has No Limits.
While it’s a lot more on-the-nose than the epic “Greatness Awaits” which accompanied the PS4, it’s infinitely better than the downright cocky “It Only Does Everything” that was used for the PS3. It’s also less weird than the awkward “Live In Your World, Play In Ours” of the PS2 as well as the PS1, so – at the end of the day – Sony’s marketing department seems to have done a pretty decent job.
But where the PlayStation 5 slogan stands out favorably against entries from the past, it may appear uninspired compared to a phrase like “Power Your Dreams,” which Microsoft had recently chosen as the tagline of their next generation of Xbox consoles.