“Right now the focus is really on the content that we’re building,” he says. “I know I get some community pushback on our first-party [slate], and what position we’re in, and I want to say to people: that same level of commitment you felt from myself and from the team as we’ve evolved platform over the last three years – as we’ve evolved service over the last three years, as we’ve evolved and innovated hardware over the last three years – is going on with our first party. I don’t want to go and pre-announce a bunch of things, but we are upping our investment, there’s no doubt about that.”
“The audience for those big story-driven games... I won’t say it isn’t as large, but they’re not as consistent. You’ll have things like Zelda or Horizon Zero Dawn that’ll come out, and they’ll do really well, but they don’t have the same impact that they used to have, because the big service-based games are capturing such a large amount of the audience. Sony’s first-party studios do a lot of these games, and they’re good at them, but outside of that, it’s difficult – they’re become more rare; it’s a difficult business decision for those teams, you’re fighting into more headwind."
“But if I was playing a single-player story-based game and all of a sudden there was a paywall in the middle ... I mean, I’m old enough I remember horse armour, right? People had this view of, ‘Wait a minute, this is not that kind of game.’ We want to open up the opportunities for developers to do what they want to go do. But I also think we have to be able to support, as an industry, all kinds of games. I hear from gamers, ‘I don’t want microtransactions in all my games. I don’t want paywalls in all my games,’ and I think they’re absolutely in their right to voice their opinion. I do think there are models where that makes sense, and there are other models where it doesn’t.”
The PS5 Exists.
