A lot has happened in the past 5 years since the PlayStation 5 released. We have watched Xbox slowly drop their focus on consoles and look towards streaming and third-party partnerships. PlayStation started competing with Game Pass with PlayStation Extra. The rise and fall of PSVR2. Now we are seeing big first party exclusives going multi-platform. All those things feel like they are just the tip of the iceberg.
PlayStation has always held prestige in the industry due to its high quality AAA exclusive games. It has arguably been their main business tactic to bring people in to their eco-system. Making PlayStation the only place to experience the best of the best. The PlayStation console always being at the core of what makes things work. But today that strategy seems to change after some comments made by the Sony Senior Vice President, Sadahiko Hayakawa.
In a corporate meeting held at Sony between Sadahiko Hayakawa and other high-ranking Sony executives, the company seems to be shifting courses. Sadahiko Hayakawa said, "In the gaming business, we are moving away from a hardware centric business model more to a platform business that expands the community and increases engagement.".
Sony won’t be so hardware centric, but instead become more of a “creation” company. Sadahiko explains, “So now as we make more transition to entertainment creation, the stability and the productivity, our performance is increasing,”. He continues to shed some more light on the reasoning behind this decision by saying, “[We] are seeing more stability in profitability and in revenue, and also the productivity of our performance is increasing.”.
He also cites their partnership with Bandai Namco as an example of creating new entertainment and IP. A big take away from this meeting, is that Sony is shifting their focus towards investing in the future of new games and IP instead of being so heavily focused on hardware.
This is not to say hardware is going anywhere or that exclusives are dead. But with this kind of change in vision, it certainly opens up the door to hoping we see exclusives being a thing of the past.
The other big take away from this meeting is that the generational console leaps will look very different moving forward. They cited in the meeting that PS4 makes up 1/3 of their install base. That is quite a large chunk of players who still haven’t upgraded. This shift will focus towards meeting players where they are at, as apposed to needing the newest console to experience new games.
What are your thoughts on these changes? Does it come as a surprise or it to be expected due to the industries current climate? Join our discord and lets talk about it!
Source: https://www.irwebmeeting.com/sony/fast/20250807/Hm92pdqE/202603_1q_01_ja/03_qa/index.html
