If there were any lingering doubts about the multi-device future of PlayStation, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida dispelled them in a video interview with the Norges Bank Investment Management. The executive said PlayStation would remain on console, but the gaming experience will be expanded to PC, mobile, and cloud.
In short, it will be ubiquitous. Wherever there is computing, users will be able to play their favorite games seamlessly. Gamers will be able to find a place to play in different spaces. While PlayStation will remain our core product, we will expand our gaming experiences to PC, mobile, and Cloud.
We’ve already seen several PC ports of former PlayStation exclusives, of course. They began with Horizon Zero Dawn in August 2020, then Predator: Hunting Grounds and Days Gone in April and May 2021, God of War in January 2022, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered in August 2022, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection and Sackboy: A Big Adventure in October 2022, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales in November 2022, Returnal in February 2023, The Last of Us Part I in March 2023, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart in July 2023. The next on the line are Helldivers 2, which is launching on the same day as the PlayStation 5 version since it is a live service game, and Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition. Sadly, there’s still no word on Ghost of Tsushima.
Sony has also been planning to expand its PlayStation franchises to mobile. They acquired mobile developer Savage Game Studios for that purpose. As for the cloud, they’ve released the PlayStation Portal device, although that’s just for Remote Play usage of existing console games.
In the aforementioned interview, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida also explained why he believes subscriptions won’t necessarily take off like they did in the video streaming industry:
Well, we do subscription business model. At the same time, people usually play one game at the time, so an all-you-can-eat type of many games may not be so valuable compared with video streaming services. We have kind of balanced a hybrid service on PlayStation Network: subscription as well as paid content.
The most recent data does seem to indicate subscription growth to have largely stalled in the gaming industry.
