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Sony'southward Kenichiro Yoshida, who took over the CEO position in April, reportedly plans to motility away from manufacturing "gadgets" and towards other acquirement sources in a bid to transform Sony's position in the global economy. Sony, of course, built its reputation on those same gadgets, starting with transistor radios, and moving into televisions, consumer electronics, and home entertainment more mostly. Devices like the PlayStation family gave the visitor one of its most enduring "ins" and established it as a multimedia titan. Simply Yoshida wants to restructure the company around subscriptions and content, not hardware, and he'south looking to trim the company'south investment in the more physical aspects of its business.

That's the word from Bloomberg, which notes that Sony striking record operating profits this past March despite selling fewer devices across all of its markets. Even PS4 shipments are downward by roughly twenty percentage. Despite this, Sony's overall sales are booming, thanks to 34.2 million PlayStation Plus customers, who pay $sixty per year to game on Sony's networks. From the company's perspective, doubling down on content production makes practiced sense. This sales turn down incidentally gives us a await 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, merely it isn't driving enough of them to actually push unit of measurement shipments support to the levels Sony enjoyed during previous years. Microsoft doesn't seem to exist doing much better.

Sales figures for 2016-2017 could reverberate a bump from PS4 Pro demand, but the 2018 estimated figures seem to bear witness a return to form. That's not terribly surprising — the PlayStation 4 family is v years old at this point. And Yoshida'southward plans suggest the visitor 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 blueprint for several years, leaving markets it in one case attempted to ain and, with the PS4, taking a back seat and using commodity technology adult by a third party (AMD, in this example), rather than attempting to build its own platform with its own custom CPU.

Merely there'southward a risk to whatever meaning change to the PS5, a fact that may not be lost on the Japanese company. During the final generation, it 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 fourth dimension around, Microsoft got tangled in its ain push for online-only gaming and a comprehensive multimedia strategy, while Sony laser-focused on "it plays games." There'due south merely no arguing that this strategy paid big dividends for the company. Microsoft and Sony both avoided the hyper-expensive costs of RROD (MS) and the PS3'due south late launch and expensive BOM (Sony), but Sony yet benefited from its focus and notwithstanding enjoys a huge sales advantage over Microsoft. The company may desire to cement those gains, but it's unlikely to run a risk killing the goose to practice it.

Even so, it'll be interesting to see how Sony evolves on the PS5 every bit that console moves closer to launch. During the run-upwardly to this current generation, a nifty bargain of ink was spilled on the question of whether gamers still wanted consoles at all. You lot won't find many people asking that question today, even as streaming and multimedia services seem likely to be a greater pct of Sony'south focus this time around.

Now read: The Best Free Games on the PS4