While Nintendo is primarily a dedicated video game company, Sony’s PlayStation division doesn’t view it as a direct competitor, except in Japan.
This was something former PlayStation Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida mentioned, and his explanation makes sense, especially when you factor in Nintendo’s dominance in Japan.
PlayStation Doesn’t Even See Xbox As Competition In Japan
Shuhei Yoshida spoke about PlayStation’s view on the Big N in a podcast (viaNintendo Everything).
Yoshida said something we all knew all along, thatPlayStation saw Xbox as its main competitor, given that the two companies released relatively similar hardware and targeted the same demographic. In comparison to Nintendo, which targets “a different audience,” and has a vastly different console when it comes to power and features.
Yoshida shared, “Working for PlayStation, their perception of the competition is always Xbox. They see Microsoft being the competition because Xbox is very similar – performance, hardware. Like a high-end console, mature games and Nintendo is very, very different. Nintendo is family-friendly, games for everyone, and not about technology, it’s more about having fun with friends and family and always have multiple controllers, bundled with the hardware.”
He continued, “Inside Sony, even when they do a business analysis, Nintendo doesn’t show up. So there’s a competition market share between PlayStation and Xbox, and somehow they don’t included Nintendo – not that they’re ignoring Nintendo, but that they do not necessarily feel Nintendo is competition because Nintendo is covering a different audience.”
The key difference here is that “Nintendo is bringing a young audience into gaming and some of them when they grow up might graduate into more mature systems like PlayStation or Xbox. Of course there’s huge respect for what Nintendo does in terms of how Nintendo should be doing in the industry. We all felt that it’s great to have Nintendo continue to be successful so that we can grow the industry – continue to grow the industry together kind of feeling,” Yoshida continued.
Yoshida then talked about the Japan market, stating, “Except for one market – it’s Japan. In Japan Nintendo is hugely strong, and Xbox almost doesn’t exist. … it’s all about Nintendo versus Sony. So PlayStation people working in Japan see Nintendo clearly as competition, but outside Japan PlayStation people clearly see Xbox as a primary competition.”
What Yoshida said makes a lot of sense, given Nintendo’s target market is generally a younger audience, and people buy Nintendo consoles to play Nintendo games. For the AAA titles, most people opt to play them on a PC, a PlayStation, or an Xbox console.
Of course, with Microsoft’snew multi-platform push, Sony might not see Xbox as a competitor in the coming months and years.
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