Though he stepped down from his place as Chairman of Sony Interactive Leisure in 2019, Shawn Layden hasn’t been shy about sharing his views about the way forward for the gaming trade. And the previous PlayStation boss believes that that the continued battle of rival consoles between Sony and Microsoft ought to come to an in depth.
Throughout an interview with Eurogamer, Layden likens the PlayStation and Xbox competitors to the format wars between VHS and Sony’s Betamax many years earlier, which was received by the previous earlier than each codecs turned out of date.
“With Xbox versus PlayStation, the Ali versus Frazier battle… Frankly, we now have to start out interrogating what the aim is of a proprietary console, and whether or not that may proceed to be true,” mentioned Layden. “When you may have competing codecs, competing platforms, competing applied sciences, there comes a time once we all declare the conflict is over… However the actual competitors will likely be on its content material. And content material needs to be the competitors for publishers, not which {hardware} you get behind. I feel we’re at some extent the place the console turns into irrelevant within the subsequent… if not the subsequent era then the subsequent subsequent era positively.”
Whereas Microsoft has been testing the waters by releasing just a few Xbox video games on PlayStation 5–including the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Nice Circle–Layden does not see a necessity for Sony to reciprocate by bringing PS5 video games to Xbox.
“Ought to PlayStation, with that massive market lead and the momentum, apparently, going ahead, ought to they construct variations of their video games to run on a competing platform of a lot smaller dimension and scale? Because the saying goes, I do not know if the juice is well worth the squeeze,” associated Layden. “You understand the Sony fanbase will get actually upset at any time when a sport comes out on PC, 18 months after the unique launch on PlayStation… And if that is what they are going to say a few PC launch, simply think about what the market would say about Xbox releases from PlayStation Studios.”
Layden has beforehand remarked that he believes the rival consoles have “reached a ceiling” and should not battle “over teraflops.” Sony has reportedly already made made some early strikes to line up its PlayStation 6 chips, whereas the specs for the subsequent Xbox stay a subject of hypothesis for now. Whereas each consoles are years away, Microsoft and Sony apparently additionally share ambitions of creating new moveable methods as nicely.