POWER PLAY

Jim Ryan, president and CEO, SIE

You’re coming into this generation with a head start. Are you confident you can sustain that lead, and how do you plan to achieve that – inasmuch as you can plan ahead given the pandemic?

We tend to benchmark ourselves more against our own internal objectives in terms of maintaining a lead, increasing a lead or protecting a lead. For the second part of your question, I’d speak to the fact that we’ve painstakingly built this very large and rich PS4 community. One one of the things we’ve seen this year is that more of them are more engaged with their PS4s than ever before. I think – to the extent that we can be successful in transitioning that community from PS4 to PS5, at a scale and pace greater than we’ve ever had them make that transition – that’s where the opportunity lies. All history tells us that in the first year or so, 75% – give or take – of those who buy a next-generation console will be upgraders from the previous generation. When you’ve got such a large and fertile and ritually engaged base as we do, that opportunity is a very sizable one for us.

Obviously Covid has made a difference to your plans, but has your strategy changed at all in light of Microsoft’s approach?

It hasn’t really changed us at a strategy level, but it really has affected our execution and our tactics. On the second part of the question: no, we fixed on our product lineup late last year. Our preferred pricing was determined early in this calendar year, prelockdown. And we just got on and executed with what we wanted to do.

This ‘preferred price’ didn’t change at all from your original plan?

[Flatly] No. No, no, it didn’t, no. We’ve been able to launch PlayStation 5 at $399, ¤399, with all the horsepower and the feature set that the console has, at the same price that we launched PS4 back in 2013. That was important for us, and we’re very happy that we’ve been able to do that. 399 worked very well for us last time round and we’d like it to work very well for us this time round, too.

The next-gen difference in a lot of games isn’t so much about visuals as speed and convenience – and in the case of the DualSense, it’s very much a case of feeling is believing. How do you communicate that to players, particularly during a pandemic?

This is an area where Covid has complicated our world. Because we would have had hundreds of thousands of gamers able to witness for themselves the elimination of the friction point that has always existed in console gaming – which is the time it takes to load a game. Having that go away is great. Had we been able to have people sample the DualSense controller over the course of the summer and the autumn, the word of mouth would have been a lot further advanced. But we just have to roll our sleeves up and get on with it and we’re going to have a great launch even absent being able to do that. I think that word of mouth that is so important for something like this – because you’re right, you have to try it or hear about it firsthand from somebody that you know and trust – will start. And what we’ve all seen over so many years with videogames is that word of mouth can be incredibly powerful.