PlayStation Boss Wants Change He's Not Willing To Make
The head of PlayStation wants to expand its reach with expensive games on hard-to-get hardware
kotaku.com
Yesterday, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said he wants his company's games to one day be as prolific as music or movies. He would love to see a world where potentially "hundreds of millions of people" could enjoy them. It's the type of future a lot of gaming executives talk about, but one that Sony seems to have no interest in actually achieving.
It's an admirable sentiment, especially, as Ryan points out, because of the implications it would have for developers and players, their hobby opening up to a much wider audience. "That's potentially really amazing and really powerful," Ryan said. But it also seems bizarrely at odds with Sony's current strategy around the PS5.
The company hasn't made video game streaming a center piece, nor has it bet big on PS Now the way Microsoft has with Game Pass. It doesn't release many small games, or mobile games. And the company only just started bringing some of its biggest blockbusters to PC—years after they originally came out. It's no fault of Sony's that a pandemic has led to manufacturing shortages and upended global supply chains, but even if you could find a PS5 in stores, it represents the high-end of console gaming when compared to the Xbox Series S, Nintendo Switch, and Switch Lite.
"Right now, we are narrowing ourselves down into genres and sequels and certain types of games," Shawn Layden, former CEO of SIE Worldwide Studios, told GamesIndustry.biz in July. "Favourites like my own, like Parappa and Vib-Ribbon, those things don't seem to get a chance to come out on stage. That's bad for the industry and for fans. Over time, that leads to a crumbling of the games industry if we just keep talking to the same people and telling the same stories in the same way."
Layden, who abruptly stepped down from Sony in 2019 a few months after Ryan took over, has recently been a critic of burgeoning development budgets, calling for companies to embrace shorter, cheaper games instead. This sentiment has also become a rallying cry for others in the industry. "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding," FanByte Media's Jordan Mallory tweeted in June 2020. In August of this year, indie developers answered the call with the "Shorter Games, Worse Graphics" bundle.
it's interesting to see that jim ryan is trying to talk about achieving something that his own company hasn't even begun to embrace. with PS Now seemingly on the back burner, the scant few PC releases being for games years away from their original launch, and both options of the PS5 being prohibitively expensive when compared to direct and indirect competitors. i kinda think sony should be doing more to go after that "let's have as many people as possible play our games" mentality that jim ryan expresses they want.
regardless, if this has been posted already, nuke from orbit