I know, I’m late on this. It’s been a week, whatever. I still wanted to write about this one. Last week when Sony unveiled the PlayStation 5 logo it was met with, shall we say, mixed reactions. The internet quickly mocked the fact that it looked just like the previous PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 logos. This is something I defended, as branding consistency is a good thing. That being said, I considered it nothing major to announce or show, and the fact that some outlets covered it like a serious announcement was hilarious to me.
I thought that would be the end of it, until I saw a tweet that same day from a PlayStation fan touting that the post reveal had a large number of likes on Instagram.
I figured it was just a lone fanboy being, well, a fanboy. I was wrong. As that day progressed it became its own news topic in the PlayStation fan community.
You can see another example of this being discussed here, at this PlayStation fan site.
The statement went much like the above tweet – because this had more “likes” on Instagram, the PlayStation logo was obviously more cared about than the Xbox Series X reveal announcements.
This is, of course, completely nonsensical for many reasons, some of which I alluded to in reply’s to my above tweets, but will cover here.
The assertion goes that this high number of likes means that more people must care about this topic. They also use raw numbers of followers for given accounts as some kind of metric to judge overall interest in a given product.
The above are both completely flawed reasoning, as not everyone uses Instagram. That should be so obvious, but is so ignored by these people looking for any and every reason to defend their brand of choice. All this tells you is what a group of Instagram users like. That simple. That’s as far as the information can be used – with regard to what users of that platform are interested in.
The above linked PlayStation fansite says in their article:
At the time of writing, the official PlayStation Instagram account can boast of a whopping 4.2 million likes on its PS5 logo reveal while the Xbox Series X announcement trailer debuted at The Game Awards 2019 is sitting at 1.8 million views. A separate post made on the same day detailing the name and the box itself currently has just under 990,000 likes a month later. It is worth noting that PlayStation also has more than double the amount of followers Xbox does on Instagram, but this is clearly proof that the Sony fanbase is eager for further information.
This is the typical attitude I find from these kinds of fanboys and sites run by them — a presumption that, in this case, double-tapping on a photo on an Instagram account somehow means there’s an incredible interest, and the fact that an equal or greater number of people did not do the same for an alternate gaming platform means people are clearly more interested in their platform of choice as opposed to the other with, again, no consideration that this stat means fuck all.
Seriously, that’s all we’re talking about — the number of registered users on a random social media platform decided to double tap a photo. Such a great effort, wow!
The irony is, on the above site, one commenter says the following:
Also could be that a lot of xbox owners aren’t old enough to have social media accounts.
This is truly ironic to me, as I contest that it’s quite possible and probable that the average Xbox owner is too busy working and having a life to worry about liking every single post a company will make. I know I personally ignore mostly every post Xbox, as a brand, makes on Instagram since it’s just marketing. That’s all any of these companies social media posts, in the end, are. Marketing. Nothing more.
This kind of stuff just isn’t that important, which I think is the key take away from all this — it doesn’t fucking matter. Who the hell cares about Instagram likes? Fanboys who have to desperately prove day in, day out, how “superior” their plastic game box of choice is.
Grow up.
I almost feel like this is both a counter to everyone mocking how simplistic the logo is, as well as trying desperately to take away anything they can from the Xbox side of things, as right now the brand seems to be in pretty damn good standing for public opinion… that is, via metrics that actually matter outside of their own platform.
Oh, and one last thing — if you’re questioning why I bothered to write this covering something so “unimportant” remember — I’m not the one making a big deal out of Instagram likes. I’m just commenting on how absurd I think it is to try to use that as a defense of interest in something, or to make it much of news at all. I’m not the one blowing a bunch of double taps on a picture out of proportion to support my biases. 😉