Sony, are you shitting me?

I don’t mind Sony. I don’t have a beef with them or particularly feel anything for them. I admit that whenever I look for stuff like a television set or something related to music and sound, I default checking Sony’s products first due to my old paradigm on how Sony used to be at the forefront of this technology before PlayStation. However, I do feel that I keep writing about them almost every week and I’ve consciously skipped an easy topic or two just because this isn’t Sony news The Blog. However, when Sony comes out with a QA saying consoles are a niche business, there’s some bullshitting around.

According to Sony’s CEO, Jim Ryan, video game consoles are a niche business.

One has to wonder first compared to what. Considering Sony has some 25% of the market share on their back, the PlayStation 4 has sold some 96 million units and that gaming is currently their life-saving section of products. I guess it’s good to throw this sort of PR out there after the Switch passed PS4 and Xbox One in terms of sales in Japan despite being a newer device, and now that Sony partnered up with Microsoft to push for cloud gaming. We really have to question if consoles are a niche, and the answer is no a loud No. 

When talking to investors like this, comparisons have to be kept in mind. Console gaming is a niche compared to the number seen in mobile games, much like how browser games eclipsed pretty much every other section of the overall electronic gaming market. The numbers are stupidly different, but if we simply stare at the numbers in a vacuum, we can say that consoles have become a niche. Cloud gaming, like it or not, is making its major steps into the mainstream. Sony’s Playstation Now service has made some good bucks already, but it isn’t exactly mainstream at this point. A normal family probably buys a PlayStation console to play some of the sports games and few of the hits along the way, and then use it to stream Netflix or some other service, never even realising PlayStation Now is a thing unto itself. Assuring the investors that Sony is moving towards the future of gaming by setting the stage in sheer numbers is a good move, but then we remember most investors often do not have any touch to the ground level consumer. None of PlayStation’s games will ever be Fate/GrandOrder in terms of revenue. Then again, the model of getting constant revenues instead of one-time purchase from the consumers is enticing. On the other hand, Adobe shit their bed with a product half the quality and twice the price (ever continuing one too) compared Clip Paint Studio, but I’m here to shit on Adobe now.

Let’s take that for face value for a moment; consoles are a niche market. Then why, if they’re a niche market, would Sony put censorship policies into effect that further would push the niche market down? You would think that when you’re competing in a Red Ocean market, you’d like to spread your net well enough to net in more consumers. However, what Sony’s doing is pretty much the exact opposite for brownie points. I know, I keep shitting on them about this and there are other topics to write about.

It’s not uncommon for businessmen and politicians to say one thing towards different groups, and Sony’s no different. Perhaps this is Sony also laying some groundwork to explain the possible low sales of the PlayStation 5, seeing the Switch has been passing the PlayStation 4. It makes investors a bit jumpy, when your competitor is making more sales. The prestige and powerhouse nature of Sony’s hardware line against a dingy toy-looking like device should be overpowering, but reality isn’t that nice. Though Nintendo hasn’t exactly been keeping up with games to play on the system themselves. Appeasing the current and future worries your investors have is paramount. You’ve seen this whenever I’ve discussed Nintendo’s, or more importantly, Capcom’s investor relations.

As a side note, I have to wonder what sort of drive Sony will put behind PlayStation 5. Original PS had 3D graphics, and the original model is still one of the best CD players that were. PS2 broke through the DVD market and effectively made it in Japan. PS3 boosted through with Blu-Ray, but PS4 had effectively nothing to drive it like this. It was the first time Sony effectively put out a standard device fitting to their image. PlayStation 5 supposedly will have full backwards compatibility with everything, and pushing PlayStation Now further up the wazoo will become a key element.

It does look like Sony’s just covering their ass over Switch selling more and wanting to promote the best and healthy direction of cloud gaming. That is, without a doubt, part of it. The word niche carries some heavy connotations to it, and as consumers tend to wonder what the hell they really mean with millions selling product. Is Sony shitting me when they say video game consoles are a niche product? No, but they are bullshitting their investors by claiming this. Then again, consoles are a niche in the electronic gaming environment, but I doubt they use the term in this sense. That’d be too smart of them.

Then again, Vita was an absolute shitshow. Sure it has its absolutely hardcore fans, yet outside of that it had low sales, low success rate in software and absolutely horseshit support from Sony. It wouldn’t be a stretch they’d include this failure into their argument why consoles are a niche, when they just fucked up royally and don’t admit to it. And no, Vita doesn’t magically become a super fine handheld after you mod it for piracy and emulators. I have a goddamn laptop that can do that geometric amounts better and I can do errything else on it to boot. Such a waste of good hardware too.

The paradigm of electronic gaming is ever-shifting. The original PC-Arcade-Paradigm that I so much talk and love died in the mid-90’s. We’ve been talking about video games since as an umbrella term for all electronic gaming, despite that being vehemently incorrect term. Platform cross-pollination effectively killed PC-Console division, with the current paradigm being One Game, Many Ports sort of deal. Whatever you choose, you get 90% same library. It’s that remaining 10% that matters for consoles. With the current paradigm and the decentralisation away from the traditional living room model that’s been going on for some time now, being able to stream whatever shit you want whenever you want to any device you can probably is a strong contender, but it’s not like there’s room for Switch’s model of dedicated device and physical games to exist next to digital-only Google and Sony intend to move toward. It’d be insanity to think that only one form of entertainment consumption is viable, or that filling a niche wouldn’t yield profits.