PlayStation 5 - opsta tema

**Highlights:** | **Jim Ryan:**

* "I'm expecting Thursday's PlayStation 5 event to be a strong showing for Sony."

* "It will focus on areas where Sony is traditionally strong: product design, with what I assume will be the full reveal of the PS5, and its games development expertise."

* "I'm expecting a more competitive line up of first-party content between Sony and Microsoft next-gen, so the next few weeks and months of reveals should have a lot to offer the console gamer and give us a better idea of how the platforms will perform in the market."

* "One key aspect I'll be looking out for is confirmed exclusives for PS5. With Microsoft following a different commercial path, Sony's strategy to embrace exclusives for its next-gen console is a key differentiator. Concerning the hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if there was no pricing announcement, although we commonly get pricing at around this time, normally at E3, before a launch at the end of the year. The COVID-19 crisis and the economic situation means that choosing when to confirm the pricing is more of a challenge, and, in the current climate, it probably makes sense to wait longer before the reveal."

**On challenges in current climate and commitment to global launch this year**

"But we are obviously principally occupied with getting ready for PS5. I think most businesses would find themselves challenged with the working-from-home environment, and I do think the way that the various groups within PlayStation have responded has been magnificent. There are the hardware engineers who are having to work without being able to get into China, where PS5 will be assembled. That's kind of tough. The software engineers who are building these great features, who are building a great PS5 UI... some of that can be readily done in isolation. But when it comes to putting it all together, that's not easy to do remotely and they're doing a great job.

And finally, the people who make games. We, and our partners, seem to be coping really well. And so we are on track. We are going to launch this holiday and we're going to launch globally. We're really looking forward to it and it's going to be a blast."

**On pricing and value**

"Recent history has told us that gaming is one of the pastimes and one of the businesses, that benefits in economically difficult times," Ryan suggests. "It's quite logical, people don't have the money to go out so they stay at home. Now, who knows how this recession is going to look, how deep it will be and how long it will last. It could be that the historic templates, the historic models, that have applied in the past may not apply in the future."

"I think the best way that we can address this is by providing the best possible value proposition that we can. I don't necessarily mean the lowest price. Value is a combination of many things. In our area it means games, it means a number of games, depth of games, breadth of games, quality of games, price of games... all of these things and how they avail themselves of the feature set of the platform."

**On Generational Philosophy**

One way to keep PS4 users engaged would be to make upcoming PS5 games playable on the older machine, just like Microsoft is proposing with its Xbox Series X games being playable on Xbox One. Yet Ryan says that's not something PlayStation is interested in doing.

"We have always said that we believe in generations. We believe that when you go to all the trouble of creating a next-gen console, it should include features and benefits that the previous generation does not include. And that, in our view, people should make games that can make the most of those features.

"We do believe in generations, and whether it's the DualSense controller, whether it's the 3D audio, whether it's the multiple ways that the SSD can be used... we are thinking that it is time to give the PlayStation community something new, something different, that can really only be enjoyed on PS5."

**On Marketing The PS5**

"That's the challenge I've set the teams: try to get that community, the 100 million people -- and all of the people who don't have a PlayStation we'd like to talk to -- just as excited as if they were in the E3 auditorium, or if they were watching the stream."