Former PlayStation CEO Andrew House Discusses PS5, Next Generation of Consoles
Paolo Sirio
During a recent talk at GamesBeat Summit 2018, former PlayStation CEO Andrew House discussed what he thinks the next generation of consoles and PS5 will be like in a few years from now. First and foremost, he believes consoles will be around, and in the current shape, for a long time.
“In 2013, the vast majority of conventional wisdom was saying that consoles were dead,” House said, as summarized by Polygon. “The whole market was moving to mobile and there was no future for this. I remember saying to myself, to use a very English metaphor, ‘Am I going to be the last governor of Hong Kong, overseeing the end of consoles?’ Fortunately, all those impending doom mongers were all very wrong.”
Pressed about PlayStation 5, he said that the machine is likely in an advanced state of design right now “in laboratories.” He added that he doesn’t know the specifics, but that he expects the longer cycles for the consoles and this could be a hint at more powerful machine than in the past.
“I’m very bullish on longer life cycles for consoles,” House said. “Consoles are so under-represented and under-penetrated in so many markets around the globe. There’s so much potential. Let’s not forget that China is still largely [untapped].”
Interestingly, he stated that he doesn’t believe there’ll be a complete shift in terms of distribution of the content, with discs still being around, although cloud will be an increasingly more important factor in the market.
“I don’t have any firm knowledge on this, but my sense is that you will see the disc around in the industry for a while.If you’re going to tap into some of these [developing] markets, then allowing for that more traditional physical purchase model as an option is probably no bad thing. (…) If you look back at console gaming history, there are certain inflection points that allow for the industry to be upended and for new participants to emerge. One of those is when you have a wholesale shift in the distribution method.”
A recent rumor stated PS5 could be releasing between 2018 and 2019, while Kotaku’s s sources, as we’ve reported during the last few hours, claim that the next Sony console won’t be out at least until 2020.
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