Andrew House, the former head of Sony Interactive Entertainment, recently shed some light on what consumers can expect from Sony moving forward.
In an interview with Mike Vorhaus at the GamesBeat conference, House talked about what could be next for the PlayStation brand. He predicts that the PlayStation 4 will stick around for quite a while and we won’t see Sony release a PlayStation 5 anytime soon.
When House was pressed to speculate about the PlayStation 5, he stated that it was probably in an advanced stage of design in a “laboratory” somewhere. He went on to say that he thinks hardware cycles should be longer than they have been in the past.
“Consoles are so under-represented and under-penetrated in so many markets around the globe. There’s so much potential. Let’s not forget that China is still largely [untapped],” said House in the interview with Polygon.
Sony launched the PlayStation 2 in 2000, before the company released the PlayStation 3 six years later in 2006. Sony released the PlayStation 4 seven years later. The console is almost five years old. While there is speculation that the next console generation could arrive as early as 2020, House touched on the ability to upgrade hardware within a generation as a reason to believe the PlayStation 4 is going to last a lone time.
House also predicted that future consoles will still feature disc drives because consumers in developing markets still depend on discs due to poor internet infrastructure.
House’s final prediction is that users will start to see game streaming become a larger focus for publishers as it will allow them to reduce costs, in turn allowing developers to take more risks.
“The evidence I draw on was the original launch of PlayStation. That wasn’t based on 3D graphics alone. The vision was to shift from expensive cartridges to more accessible and cheaper disks. Dropping that barrier allowed developers to take more risks. Streaming could be the next inflection point. But the business model has to be thought through,” said House in an interview with Polygon.
Source: Polygon
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