Hiroki Totoki, current CFO of Sony, says cloud gaming could pose a threat to traditional physical consoles like the PlayStation down the line, but he doesn’t believe it’ll do so in the near future.
That’s according to comments from Sony’s latest quarterly conference call translated by Twinfinite in which Totoki addresses the risks and opportunities facing PlayStation in the next five years.
According to those translations, cloud gaming rendering physical consoles obsolete is an extreme example of a potential threat, but Totoki says it’ll be much longer than five years before that is the case.
As for risks in the more immediate future, Totoki says that the rise of cross-platform free-to-play games could be considered a possible threat, though he notes that relationships with third-party partners will help Sony mitigate any negative effects from either risk factor.
His comments come just as the PlayStation 4 surpasses 91.6 million sold, a milestone hit around 5 years into the PlayStation 4’s lifetime. However momentum for the current generation of consoles is slowing down, as noted in Sony’s latest financial reports, and the company is hoping that network service and add-on content sales will help mitigate that potential “volatility” in its hardware business going forward.
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2019