It’s 8am on the day of the North America and Japanese launch for the PlayStation 5. Jim Ryan, chief executive of Sony Interactive Entertainment – and therefore the man responsible for overseeing one of the biggest consumer tech launches of the decade – is talking to The Telegraph from his north London home, with an assortment of greeting cards adorning the mantlepiece behind him.
“If I was able to travel, I’d probably try and leverage the time zones by finding a way to do both the Japanese and the US launches in the same day, which, you know if you work the time zones right, probably would just about have been possible,” explains Ryan ruefully, before adding what should have been a day of globetrotting and glad handing will instead end with a tripartite global company business update starting at 10.30pm.
You couldn’t ask for a more on-the-nose illustration of the unusual times we’re living in.
As if to add irony to injury, on the day PlayStation resumes retail battle with rival Xbox, its President is conducting media interviews via Microsoft Teams.
Travel restrictions notwithstanding, the launch of the PlayStation 5 represents a career-defining moment for Ryan, a genial Geordie accountant by trade who started at the now defunct Sony Computer Entertainment Europe as international finance officer in 1994.
Ryan’s ascendency neatly coincides with the brand’s. The first PlayStation console was launched the year after he joined, kickstarting a gaming hardware dynasty which would shape the medium for decades to come.
Indeed, for several generations of gamers, that brand has become synonymous with the pastime itself. A groundbreaking marketing strategy targeting twenty-somethings rather than the traditional teenage gaming audience positioned PlayStation as the post-clubbing entertainment form of choice and transformed the demographics of the video games industry. The PSOne went on to sell a shade over 100m units. Its successor, released in 2000, sold another 50m more again and remains the most successful games console of all time.
“It’s a journey we’ve been on for 25 years,” reflects Ryan. “And even now, we have many, many people writing to me desperate to try and get a PS5 – people in their 50s, late-50s often, who started with us in 1995 who have remained PlayStation community members since then. And now it’s always nice to read that their sons or daughters are PlayStation gamers.”
The Sony PlayStation 5 and Digital Edition
The PS5 is being released at a time when the video games industry can justifiably lay claim to being the world’s biggest entertainment sector. Analysts Newzoo predict the global gaming market will generate $159bn in revenue this year, and will break the $200bn mark by 2023.
Crucially, the industry’s paradigm shift to digital distribution means it’s also lockdown-proof. Consumer spending on video games in the third quarter of this year (July-September) in the US topped $11.2bn – 24pc up on the same period last year. And Sony’s platforms are responsible for a fair chunk of that change thanks to the 112m PlaySation 4s it has sold since 2013.
As global sales and marketing chief, Jim Ryan played a not inconsiderable supporting role in that success. As chief executive, he now has ultimate responsibility for getting the PS5 to market , which includes dealing with the unprecedented challenges caused by Covid.
“On the production side, the first wave of the pandemic, when lockdown was really very rigorous pretty much all around the world, made it impossible for us to visit our factories and in person sign off or approve the final manufacturing setup,” Ryan explains. “All of that had to be done remotely, basically by camera. As you can imagine, that is a very, very non-trivial task.”
The effort appears to be paying off. PlayStation 5 pre-orders sold out in a matter of hours back in September and woe betide anyone who has not paid in advance trying to secure one on the UK launch day on Thursday. After spending all year trying to generate demand, Ryan says almost all of his effort now is focused on producing supply to meet that demand, both in the run-up to Christmas and beyond.
Assassins Creed Valhalla is one of the latest games on the Playstation 5
Credit: Ubisoft
Ryan is surprisingly coy when it comes to targets. In September 2013, his then counterpart Andrew House stood on stage at the Tokyo Game Show and pledged a punchy 5m sales of the imminent PS4 by the end of the financial year. Sony ended up beating the target by 2m units.
Ryan refuses to set a similar target for the PS5, but commits to outstripping that previous performance. “And, you know, given all the things that we’ve just spoken about achieving that, in my humble opinion will be a great achievement,” he says, adding: “We’re on track to do that.”
Only the third of Sony’s four PlayStations to date has failed to break the 100m sales barrier – an uncharacteristically complacent misstep arising from late entry to market and a fundamental misunderstanding of the burgeoning appeal of online gaming. With all things considered, is 100m console sales still a realistic target?
“I’m not going to make any statements about what our targets for PS5 are,” reiterates Ryan. “But I see absolutely no reason why anybody couldn’t achieve sales of 100 million consoles in this generation. And I see many reasons why that’s possible.”
Of course, it might not necessarily be Sony that achieves it. Perennial rivals Microsoft has yet to breach that barrier with the Xbox. The Xbox 360 in 2005 came closest, racking up 84.7m sales and giving the underperforming PS3 an extremely good run for its money in the process. Its confusingly named successor, Xbox One, flopped, but the American giants look set to rebound resoundingly this time round.
The Xbox Series X, released worldwide last week, is marginally more powerful than the PS5, but is most significant as a Trojan horse for Microsoft’s consumer-friendly all-you-can-play subscription service. Dubbed the Netflix of games, Game Pass gives consumers access to 200 games on tap, including all of Microsoft’s self-developed exclusives on the day of release, for a monthly fee starting at £7.99.
The Xbox Series X is the biggest rival to the new Playstation
It’s an attractive offering in an era when Sony is pricing the exclusive games developed by its world-leading first party studios at £70 a pop. Ryan doesn’t fear the prospect of a console war (“we’re always at our best when we’re faced with strong competition”) and readily admits new business models are a good thing for consumers. However, he’s previously dismissed a similar model that would see Sony giving away its proprietary titles games to subscribers in such a manner as “unsustainable”.
“We like making big blockbuster games; that’s what we do at PlayStation,” he says. “And when I made that comment, I’m not criticising anybody else’s approach. Different gaming platforms find themselves in different situations and what makes perfect sense for somebody else just just doesn’t make sense for us. We have huge budgets to make these wonderful PlayStation games. And in order for us to be able to do that, we have to give them a kind of box office launch.”
Some of Microsoft’s Game Pass packages allow games to be streamed to other devices, including PCs and Android phones. Combined with the competition from streaming services such as Google’s Stadia and Amazon Gaming, not to mention Apple’s increasing activity on mobile, many experts are predicting the PS5 could be the last premium machine of its kind.
PlayStation 5 specs
Rumours of the games console’s demise are nothing new, of course. When interviewing Andrew House at Sony’s Tokyo headquarters ahead of the PS4 Pro launch in 2016, I reminded him that the PS4 was similarly meant to be the last living room box of its kind, and yet there he was showing off another one. Four years on the joke hasn’t aged a jot.
“I think it’s very simple,” says Ryan when asked why the boxed console refuses to die. “We give people something that they really like and they really enjoy. Gaming is the largest category of entertainment. It is the fastest growing category of entertainment. And the video gaming console allows for a premium gaming experience. And right now, there’s no other way to enjoy that.
“So for as long as that’s possible, I think the console business is going to remain robust and healthy.”
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