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In a recently published interview, Sony platform business group CEO Hideaki Nishino affirms that PlayStation consoles are here to stay, though the company still wants to reach players on PC and elsewhere.
Speaking to Famitsu (translated via DeepL and compared with Google Translate), Nishino says that since many of us are still playing PS4 games and "the number of PS5 games is increasing," he doesn't see PlayStation majorly changing any time soon. He thinks consoles will be the center of Sony's gaming business for "a while."
Nishino adds that while the PlayStation Portal now supports cloud streaming, essentially enabling console-free gaming, "you still need a controller and a screen at your fingertips," so he reiterates that hardware isn't going anywhere.
But there are plenty of people in the world who don't own a PlayStation machine and maybe never will. On that, Nishino notes that the company wants to reach a growing number of players on other platforms like PC. (One outreach method has included making PC players create a PSN account to play some games, which didn't go down well in the Helldivers 2 community.)
In some ways, this echoes Xbox's playbook for a multiplatform push, with Sony considering ways to gain PlayStation users outside PlayStation consoles. Unlike Xbox, Nishino specifically points to Sony's flagship consoles as the keystone; if Xbox has a keystone, it's probably Game Pass. Microsoft recently unveiled its 'This is an Xbox' campaign, showing off all the devices you can play its games on thanks to cloud gaming, to sum up and reinforce years spent transitioning away from a console-first approach.
PlayStation is behind Xbox when it comes to cloud gaming, but since it beats Xbox in console sales and likely will keep doing so going into the next generation, even if Nintendo may come out on top anyway, it doesn't strictly need to invest as much into this technology. Still, it'd be good to see games become more accessible.
I've been a PlayStation owner all my life, and I doubt that will ever change due to the physical and digital games collection I've amassed, but I still like to see more options for people who don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars for the consoles. For now, it seems unlikely Sony will fully take the Microsoft route and try to turn everything into a PlayStation, though the likes of iOS and Android devices already support game streaming.
While you're here, check out the best PS5 games you can play right now. Maybe in a couple of years you won't even need a PlayStation to enjoy them.
