Jim Ryan Interview

[the-pi-guy]

Sauce

The Japanese tech company pre-sold as many PS5 consoles in the first 12 hours in the United States as in the first 12 weeks for its predecessor PlayStation 4 device, Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said in an interview.

Sony's will continue to grow its studio capability organically Ryan said, adding that "where we can bolster our in-house capability with selective M&A that might be possible."

[kitler53]

not sure the 12 hours vs 12 weeks says much other than ps5 has a lot of stoke.  ps4 was pretty scarce for about 4 months.   if ps5 can have crazy stock levels and still be sold out after 4 months that says something.   ...if they sell 15 million this holiday but then sales fall off a cliff early next year i'm not so sure that's really a good thing for playstation.

[Xevross]

How often was the PS4 actually available during the first 12 weeks? This basically just tells us that PS5's first pre-order allocation in mid-September was bigger than the amount of PS4's that had been allocated up to about mid-September as well, which is no surprise.

Can't wait to see real sales figures.

[the-pi-guy]

PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan on making PS5 more successful than PS4 | GamesIndustry.biz

PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan on making PS5 more successful than PS4
"I've done them all, and this has easily been the most extraordinary PlayStation launch of any of them."

Since the pre-orders went live, every day I open my inbox to some very emotional and heart-wrenching emails from lots of people," Ryan says. "But so many of them are from people in the mid-50s, who say they've been a PlayStation gamer since 1995, and they're asking us to help them get hold of a PS5.

Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda for $7.5 billion raised a few eyebrows, but it's really just a headline moment for an industry that's been consolidating for some time. More games companies have been going public and using those funds to go and acquire, while giants like Microsoft and Tencent have been actively seeking teams to buy. Sony, too, has been getting involved with its $229 million acquisition of Spider-Man developer Insomniac.

Ryan says that more acquisitions are possible, but he was eager to remind us that Sony's existing studios have grown considerably over the last generation.

"It's probably not widely appreciated or understood, to what extent that we have grown our own game development capability organically over the course of this generation," he says. "Obviously, it's been helped by the acquisition of Insomniac, and it's wonderful to have them as part of the family. I would just invite anybody to look at the launch window line-up of the PS4 generation, or PS3 generation, and compare it to what we are going to bring in the equivalent phase of PS5. There's just no comparison.

"That is the fruit of not massive spending sprees, but of very, very steadily, carefully planned organic growth. Probably the best example I give... I could obviously talk about Naughty Dog, but they've always been making great games. But let's talk about Ghost of Tsushima, which has been a critical delight and certainly a commercial delight to an extent that we didn't think it would be. That speaks volumes to the work that Sucker Punch has done to build on their previous canon of work.
"We are lucky enough to have five or six studios who fall into that category... But it isn't luck, because we've been working on this for years and years. Very quietly, in a very PlayStation way, we've been building something quite special with these studios. You can do it with frenzied acquisition, or measured acquisition, or you can do it organically."