A reader reacts to rumours that Sony is getting out of the gaming hardware business and suggests that if it’s not true it should be their policy anyway.
There was a very alarming rumour going around this week, that Sony had said it is going to give up making gaming hardware. ‘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,’ is the sentence that was doing the rounds, from a Sony exec.
GC and most other sensible websites didn’t report it because the translation was apparently inaccurate, and the sentence taken out of context. I’m still not entirely clear what he was trying to say but I think that’s kind of on purpose, because he was an exec talking to investors – so he didn’t particularly want to be understood, it was all just fluff to make it sound like Sony know what they’re doing.
If anything, it seemed to be him implying they were going to do more movies and theme park type stuff with their brands, like Nintendo is nowadays. But more likely it didn’t really mean anything at all and as rumours continue to say, the PlayStation 6 is on its way just as you’d expect. But I think this is a bad idea. Not just the PlayStation 6 but the whole idea of making consoles.
I’ll say it right now, to make my bias clear, but I don’t really like Xbox or their influence on the games industry. That goes double now that they bought Activision and Bethesda and will probably snap up any other publisher that ever shows sign of weakness, like EA and Ubisoft.
It’s not because of console war reasons that I don’t like them, but because gaming is such a tiny part of the Microsoft whole and despite owning so much of the games industry, they’d shut it down and turn their back on it in an instant if they thought it was too much of a distinction or waste of money. As we have seen with the thousands of job losses lately.
Despite owning so much, Xbox Series X has done so badly that many people think Microsoft are going to give up making consoles, even though they say they’re not. It’s obviously going to be a super low priority for them in the future though, as they turn themselves into a third party publisher. They’re going to try and do without their own console, but that does not mean they’re no longer a threat to Sony, far from it.
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Xbox has fallen on its face two generations in a row now and Phil Spencer and the other execs are desperate for a win, to pretend it as all part of a big 4D chess game they were playing. And not, as it very obviously was, their plans failing again and again.
Not only is Microsoft pretending consoles aren’t important anymore but they’re trying to put an end to exclusives and claim they’re anti-consumer. When really these are the two things Sony does well and so they’re trying to undermine them. And the weird thing is it’s working. Even without knowing exactly what that exec was on about, it’s inevitable Sony games will appear day one on PC sooner or later and more are going multiformat.
Helldivers 2 is out on Xbox this month, despite being Sony’s only live service success. And that’s because they make more money selling its microtransactions to all gamers, rather than using it to tempt people into buying a PlayStation 5 console.
The logical end result of this is that Sony will also turn third party in the end, which I hate but I just don’t see any other outcome. What worries me is that they’re going to take so long getting around to doing it that by the time they do it, it will be too late and Microsoft will be in a dominant position – finally becoming the Netflix of gaming that they’ve always wanted.
Not because of Game Pass but because they’re such a big publisher, with so many games and companies, and they have their own cloud gaming service.
Sony might be winning the console war today – so much so that Xbox isn’t really even competing anymore – but it’s really only a battle, the war for influence in the games industry goes on and the new battleground is multiformat subscription services, cloud gaming, and live service games.
I know those aren’t things most hardcore gamers are interested in but that’s the new reality we live in and if Sony hold onto old glories, namely focusing on console hardware too much, they’ll quickly become irrelevant.
In my opinion they shouldn’t make the PlayStation 6 at all. If they’re doing a portable that’s fine and I do wonder whether they’ve already decided not to make a home console, even though leaks suggest otherwise. They should stop though. Consoles are not the future of gaming and Sony needs to understand that and make sure they’re read to fight on in the new reality we all find ourselves in.
By reader Coolsbane
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