Second Shawn Laydenex CEO di PlayStation, every console generation manages to achieve a maximum of 250 million buyersa limit that indicates that the sector is not growing as much as it could.
The solution? In his opinion Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo should learn from the VHS “victory”. on Betamax: the best technology does not always prevail, but the most accessible, economical and simple to adopt for the general public. To truly broaden their audience, consoles should therefore focus less on power and more on price, immediacy and an ecosystem capable of reducing entry barriers for new players.
A single format for all consoles
“We talk about gaming as a $250 billion industry, and it is, with hundreds of millions of users, and that’s true, too,” Layden said, speaking to the YouTube channel Pause for Thought and Naomi Kyle. “But of course anyone is included in that number: if you play Wordle, you are a gamer; if you play Candy Crush, you are a gamer in that statistic. The number of consoles sold in a “fair” way, however, for each generation stops at around 250 million.
“If you line up all the PS1s, Sega Saturns and N64s, and look generation by generation, the total is still there, around 250 million. The only time it got close to 300 was the Wii generation, when people thought they could buy Wii Fit and lose weight. That’s when we brought a non-traditional audience into the industry. But it was an anomaly, and since then we’ve flattened out again. We have to get over that ceilingthat barrier.”
According to Layden, to ensure market expansion the three big console manufacturers should follow a strategy similar to that of VHS and create a sort of consortiuman alliance between manufacturers to establish shared standards and a single format accessible on all consoles. In practice, the individual PS5, Xbox and Switch versions of a title would no longer exist, rather a single format capable of running on all platforms.
“Betamax lost to VHS for one reason: VHS licensed its format to many different manufacturers,” Layden explained. “Sony had the exclusive patent and trademark for Betamax and all that. We did a license with Toshiba towards the end of its life, but it never caught on as widely as VHS.”
The games coming out in January on PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Nintendo Switch 2
“I think we should get to a world where there is a single format for gaming” he said. “Maybe it could come from the PC. Or maybe we find a way to run everything on a Linux kernel or something. And then we build a consortium around that. We would have licensing programs that allow other manufacturers to enter this space, and at that point we could be talking about really significant numbers. This is how the ubiquity of the toaster is achieved. But right now, I think we’re trapped in a containment field.”
However, as previously reported, at the moment according to Layden console exclusives are still too important for Sony and Nintendo, so much so that “if Mario started appearing on PlayStation it would be the apocalypse”, which makes the creation of a format shared between all platforms unlikely, at least for the moment.
