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Sony'due south Kenichiro Yoshida, who took over the CEO position in April, reportedly plans to move away from manufacturing "gadgets" and towards other revenue sources in a bid to transform Sony's position in the global economy. Sony, of class, built its reputation on those aforementioned gadgets, starting with transistor radios, and moving into televisions, consumer electronics, and home amusement more mostly. Devices like the PlayStation family gave the company one of its most enduring "ins" and established information technology equally a multimedia titan. But Yoshida wants to restructure the company effectually subscriptions and content, not hardware, and he's looking to trim the company's investment in the more physical aspects of its business.

That's the discussion from Bloomberg, which notes that Sony hitting record operating profits this past March despite selling fewer devices across all of its markets. Even PS4 shipments are downwardly by roughly 20 percent. Despite this, Sony's overall sales are booming, thanks to 34.ii million PlayStation Plus customers, who pay $lx per year to game on Sony'due south networks. From the company'due south perspective, doubling down on content production makes skilful sense. This sales decline incidentally gives us a look at whether the PS4 Pro has been able to generate new sales figures for Sony or if we're seeing more replacement consoles than brand-new conversion. This news suggests that the PS4 Pro may be driving some sales, but it isn't driving enough of them to actually push button unit shipments back up to the levels Sony enjoyed during previous years. Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing much meliorate.

Sales figures for 2022-2017 could reflect a crash-land from PS4 Pro demand, just the 2022 estimated figures seem to show a return to grade. That's non terribly surprising — the PlayStation 4 family unit is 5 years one-time at this indicate. And Yoshida'due south plans suggest the company may be planning to pivot towards a gaming strategy that emphasizes subscriptions and long-term revenue generation from these sources rather than a hardware-centric strategy. Sony has been disentangling itself from hardware design for several years, leaving markets information technology once attempted to ain and, with the PS4, taking a back seat and using commodity applied science developed by a tertiary party (AMD, in this instance), rather than attempting to build its own platform with its ain custom CPU.

But at that place'south a risk to whatsoever significant modify to the PS5, a fact that may non exist lost on the Japanese company. During the last generation, information technology was Sony that took the take chances on positioning the PS3 as a comprehensive multimedia platform with support for Blu-ray, while Microsoft focused on playing games. This time around, Microsoft got tangled in its own push for online-but gaming and a comprehensive multimedia strategy, while Sony laser-focused on "it plays games." In that location'south simply no arguing that this strategy paid big dividends for the visitor. Microsoft and Sony both avoided the hyper-expensive costs of RROD (MS) and the PS3's late launch and expensive BOM (Sony), but Sony nonetheless benefited from its focus and still enjoys a huge sales advantage over Microsoft. The company may desire to cement those gains, but information technology's unlikely to risk killing the goose to practise it.

Still, it'll exist interesting to see how Sony evolves on the PS5 as that panel moves closer to launch. During the run-up to this current generation, a bang-up deal of ink was spilled on the question of whether gamers still wanted consoles at all. You won't notice many people asking that question today, fifty-fifty as streaming and multimedia services seem likely to be a greater percent of Sony's focus this time around.

Now read: The Best Free Games on the PS4