Sony PlayStation CEO wants seamless transition to next-generation console

As a rule, the launch of a new video game console is a major transition, in which old games and your progress are left out for the benefit of newer and better ones.

Sony wants to put an end to this. In his first interview since becoming CEO of Sony PlayStation in April, Jim Ryan has presented detailed information on his company's successor to the famous PlayStation 4 console, expected next year.

Among them, Ryan said that his company planned to offer a "game between generations", offering players the opportunity to play a game on their PS4, move to a new console and continue, and then return. Indeed, it does not matter which server they play, no matter what the Sony server is. As a result, they will all have the same friends during this time.

"Whether it's upstream compatibility or intergenerational playability, we can move this community to the next generation," he said. "It will not be a binary choice to know if you need to stay on PlayStation 4 or next-gen to continue your friendship."

Ryan is a 25-year-old veteran of Sony. He began his career in the company's European division in 1994 – just when the original PlayStation was launched – and in 2011 was named chairman of Sony's PlayStation activities in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and in Oceania. Last year, he was named vice president of Sony's PlayStation business. promoted to the position of CEO in February.

He and Shawn Layden, who runs Sony's 13 development studios The creation of games such as the highly anticipated survival adventure game The Last of Us, Part 2, will help launch the next generation PlayStation with new games and new features. The next Microsoft Xbox, The Nintendo Switch, Google's Stadia streaming service and more.

Ryan said the company had an active user base of 94 million players, of which 36 million were subscribers to the company's $ 10 monthly PlayStation Plus online gaming service. Sony has sold nearly 100 million PlayStation 4 consoles.

"The community has never been bigger and it has never been so engaged," he said. "Many of the people we brought in in 2013 are still with us, and the time and money invested in the platform is very humble."

Sony has also released little by little details about its successor PS4, familiarly called the PS5 (although Sony has refused to confirm this name). Among the new features, Sony said that its next console load games much faster, still an optical disc drive and offers immersive surround sound.

In his conversation with CNET, Ryan said that a SSD storage drive designed specifically for the console by Sony would be offered with the default version. He also added that the device would offer 4K ultra-high definition images at 120Hz, double the refresh rate of the screen of most TVs.

Ryan declined to discuss the company's plans for PSVR, other than to say that the company was satisfied with his success so far.

He declined to say when we would know more, but said that Sony was considering discussing the new PlayStation, as development versions of the device are sent to outside video game companies. "We wanted to make sure that PlayStation fans had clear and unambiguous information from us instead of deceiving confusing foolishness, third and fourth hands – some true, some perhaps less true," did he declare. "It's only the beginning of the unveiling process."

Below are excerpts from our conversation with Ryan before Video Game Conference Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), which begins in Los Angeles next week. Sony said that he would not attend the show this year.

Q: I guess a new PSVR is coming, but can you give details?
Ryan: We have nothing to say about a potential new generation VR product at this point. We continue to believe that virtual reality has the potential to be a truly meaningful part of the future of interactive entertainment.

The current generation of RVs has exceeded our expectations. When you step back and look at it (and that's what I like to watch: one in 20 people who found the money to buy a PlayStation 4, and all the games and devices they have bought with this, have also found the money to buy the PlayStation VR and all the games and peripherals added to it, and I feel good about it.

The PlayStation 4 has become one of the best selling consoles in history. How do you match that with your next-gen console?
This transition will probably be more interesting than any we've seen in the past. We obviously have a newcomer recently announced on the gaming market. [Google] and the possibility of more to come.

So the landscape is changing rapidly. If we rely a little on the world we have known for 25 years, we are likely to see the events surrounding us go beyond us. We must therefore be open-minded and have a desire to do things to a degree that we have not had to do in the past.

The MoU signed with Microsoft is one of the manifestations. This is a kind of large-scale MOU that covers several areas of collaboration between Sony and Microsoft. One of the main is the cloud game.

The world is changing very quickly and in a very interesting way.

We currently have a cloud game service that we have been adding for several years. I think we may have been a little guilty of not talking about it enough. We are now in 19 countries, we have 170 publishers, 780 games in the United States. We have actually accomplished a lot, and probably a lot more than people realize. And our goal is to take advantage of these lessons and really try to bring PlayStation Now to the next level later this year, and then in the years to come.

When you talk about seeing the world's events overtake you, are you talking about a world without a console? What do you have in mind when you say that?
Who knows what the world looks like in five years? When you have these big, very large companies coming into your space, I just think that look at the world in the terms that you have used over the last 25 years, with the competition you've had in the last 25 years, It's probably not a very wise approach to take.

Thanks to our actions and recent announcements, we believe there is an excellent market for next-generation consoles. But this is not binary. It's not as if, in three weeks or three years, the console world will stop and a world without a console – no matter what the world looks like – will suddenly take over.

Any transition will be regular and progressive. I've built PlayStation companies around the world. I can talk to you about infrastructure in some of the regions of the world where we have very, very large companies, and they will not be conducive to a fully continuous model for years and years.

Obviously, I'm not the responsible here, but when I think about how it all happens, it's that when we get to the world without a console, I'm going to play with brands, is not it? this not? I will decide that I am in the world of the PlayStation brand and that is how I will play my games. And these will be pretty much the same games, with the exception of exclusives, that I can get in the Xbox world or in the Stadia world. Is it far from the way you see it? Or is there more nuance that will distinguish between them?
It's a bit of a simplification, but you're not far off. This brings us back to these three points: Our strengths: The exclusive games, the brand and the community we have, which we are very humbled by the trust of the level of commitment they have with us.

As long as we treat them properly, with the love and respect that they deserve – and this seems probably trivial, coming from a businessman, but we really believe in that – it will be very useful for us.

Is this the last console? Everyone always talks about it, and there is this feeling, but I'm curious to know what you think.
What I think is, I do not really know. I have been around for a while. In 2012, I listened to all kinds of smart people talking about mobile and telling me that the PlayStation 4 was going to be the most terrible failure of all time.

The logic was actually difficult to criticize. But we believed in this product so, we now believe in this next generation product. Who knows how this could evolve? Hybrid models between console and some kind of cloud model? Maybe. I just do not know And if I knew it, I would not tell you.

It's just as well. So, a lot of people have built live service games these days. I know you built Dreams. I am curious to know what you think of the current market. There are obviously critics who come into games such as the EA Anthem and Fallout 76 of Bethesda. So, I would like to know what you think of this kind of games?
It's like any category of game or any category of entertainment. There are good examples and less good examples. When they have finished correctly and you look at FIFA's engagement statistics, for example, the commitment is simply amazing.

If you want to do that, you have to do it very well. It's a form of entertainment that needs to be built gradually. You can not dive into any of these live service games and do it right from the first day. It needs to be evolved and iterated, and it is not easy. It's really not easy

Do you think this type of games will be the future of how entertainment will work? Obviously, you put a lot of work behind all the experiences of history. But what do you see when you look in your crystal ball?
We have never been so successful with our own story-based and narrative-based games that we currently have. We are happy about that, and it is certainly not a kind of game we will never give up.

Service games, once well done, will continue to be popular and gain popularity. But only when the game's global ecosystem grows and more and more people play more and more games.

A topic on E3 that I hear often is the way a game's marketing is done. Looking at Sony, I will never forget #PuddleGate with your Spider-Man game and how the accusations that you had degraded the quality of your game were false. I looked back and looked at The Last of Us and was amazed at how much the scenes you showed were similar to ours. And this is not something that has happened with every company, right? Even if everyone intends to show what they hope to publish, it is obviously not everyone. So, how do you make sure that what you show years in advance is so close to what you sell later?
We always approach this issue with a high degree of integrity. And what we show is usually not years in advance – it's usually months, or even months in some cases – but it's a real gameplay that has already been developed and we have a very high degree of confidence in the final game.

That's a hypothesis, but it could be that our story-based games lend themselves better to the ability to have a fidelity between the initial vision and the final product more easily than something massively online in. his nature.