Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Chief Executive Officer, Jim Ryan, has said that the company has long moved past traditional console wars because competition now goes beyond the traditional definition of gaming.
“We are an entertainment company with a community of more than 100 million gamers with really extraordinary levels of commitment and engagement,“ Ryan said during an interview with Axios. “I would say unequivocally that we are competing for leisure hours, and that any definition of competition has to extend way beyond the boundaries of what has traditionally been defined as gaming.”
Sony has already begun exploring other forms of media for its PlayStation brand, including movies and television shows. The company is also targeting PC and mobile, the latter of which it’s aggressively pursuing.
“The thinking here is that our IP portfolio is in such a strong state right now, it seems perverse to restrict enjoyment of it to our existing PlayStation community,” Ryan told Axios with reference to Sony’s push into mobile.
The publication quizzed the executive about PlayStation’s recently-advertised head of mobile position, to which Ryan said that Sony is “working on a number of models to open up mobile” and we’ll see “the first fruits of this sooner than you might think.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Ryan clarified a controversial statement he made about older games in 2017.
“The PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?” he said with reference to older Gran Turismo games during an interview with Time – a statement that has dogged him since.
“The point I was trying to make — obviously not very well — was just how great the PS4 version looked and how far the series had evolved,” Ryan clarified.
