Sony exec says consoles will remain the “core” of its business

As reported by Eurogamer, Hideaki Nishino, the CEO of PlayStation’s “Platform Business Group,” has stated in an interview with Nikkei that consoles will remain a part of the company’s “core” of their business but says that additional platforms like PC will help it increase its share of the game market.

I mean, he would say that, since his job is managing that division and promoting its hardware. However, it has been a bit harder to justify or get excited by new consoles from Sony or Microsoft recently, often because those games can be found elsewhere. However, keeping this in mind, Nishino states (according to Eurogamer’s translation), “PCs are difficult to set up, but with PlayStation, once you turn it on, you can experience the content you bought straight away.”

Kind of! Consoles have certainly strayed away from just jamming a game in and playing it “straight away.” Usually, when I get a game on console, I expect that it’s going to spend some time installing and updating. If you buy digitally, you’ll be spending some time waiting for it to download, and if your internet isn’t speed-of-light, that can take quite a while. But I see his point, and it isn’t a novel one. PCs take some knowledge and maintenance. It’s easier to explain to my parents how to get a game on their Switch than it is to help them update their GPU drivers. To say otherwise would be disingenuous, even if things seem to be converging.

So, on one hand, bringing their games to PC might get purchases from gamers who don’t care to own a console. On the other hand, some gamers who would have bought a PlayStation for exclusives no longer have a reason to. At the same time, console architecture is becoming less proprietary as the years go on, so porting is less of an issue and not necessarily a major cost.

As it is right now, I still own a PS5, but it’s nowhere near as indispensable as my Switch. I don’t mind exclusivity, and I feel a library with a unique personality lends meaning to a console. That’s maybe not important to everyone, but as someone who eats video games every day, I like them to taste a bit different.

At the very least, this means that there are still plans to continue the PlayStation lineage. Just last week, we received news that the PlayStation 5 Pro is on the horizon, offering minor performance gains for a dizzyingly high price tag. At this point, I don’t see the PlayStation 6 announcement coming for a few years, and I’m not convinced it will be able to justify the price all that well later. I guess what I’m saying is: if Sony wants consoles to remain a “core” part of their business, they should probably have more convincing reasons.