Forward-looking: Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, in a wide-ranging interview with GamesIndustry.biz confirmed that Sony will be launching the PlayStation 5 globally this holiday season, adding that "it's going to be a blast."
There's been talk that both Sony and Microsoft might delay the launch of their next-gen consoles due to the Covid-19 pandemic but according to the Sony exec, that isn't happening.
Ryan also appeared to be priming gamers for the realization that Sony's console may not be the most affordable on the block.
"Recent history has told us that gaming is one of the pastimes, and one of the businesses, that benefits in economically difficult times," Ryan said. "It's quite logical, people don't have the money to go out so they stay at home."
The best way Sony can address this, Ryan said, is by providing the best possible value proposition. "I don't necessarily mean lowest price. Value is a combination of many things. In our area it means games, it means number of games, depth of games, breadth of games, quality of games, price of games... all of these things and how they avail themselves of the feature set of the platform."
At the onset of the pandemic, Ryan said, they realized that they were going to have to spend a lot more time paying attention to the PS4 community than they had anticipated. This involved things like the Play At Home initiative and making sure their network worked under unprecedented demand as people stayed home and dusted off their old PS4 while others bought consoles for the first time to help curb the boredom.
They've also got some great games waiting in the wings like The Last of Us Part II and Ghost of Tsushima.
"We have always felt that we had a responsibility to serve that [PS4] community for several years after the launch of PS5 and that it represented a huge business opportunity for us," Ryan added.