Sony is the undoubted king of the console video game industry. With hundreds of millions of units sold around the world, it is the undisputed champion in the battle between PlayStation and Xbox, with the latter barely shifting half the amount of all PlayStation’s editions. Only Nintendo comes close.
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However, even as the market leader, there’s no time for the Japanese innovator to sit on its heels and count its cash. As the release of the latest next-generation consoles proves, lots of the competition have made positive strides, while the PS5 has some weak spots. The question is, what areas will Sony need to work on to prevent falling behind its rivals?
Mobile Compatibility
Unsurprisingly, Sony won’t budge from its successful PlayStation strategy since it’s tried and tested. Previously, this wouldn’t be an issue, but this year, it could land them in hot water due to the continued rise of the mobile gaming sector. To put it into perspective, there are around 2.7 billion mobile gamers worldwide.
Therefore, the likes of League of Legends and Fortnite are getting nervous glances from Sony and Microsoft. After all, players love the fact that titles are available to play from anywhere on a multitude of devices. Another market that is growing at an exponential rate is the online casino and bingo industry, which currently contributes over £5 billion to the UK gambling sector. Bingo is particularly riding the crest of a wave as most platforms combine a range of releases, from slots to poker and blackjack, as well as several bingo variations, to appeal to gamers. As a result, the best bingo sites UK are not only engaging large audiences, but the people they are attracting have a traditional gaming overlap that takes away from other bases. Operators like Buzz Bingo are also making the most of being on a mobile platform and welcomes all players to ensure they appeal to the larger audience possible.
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MS has reacted by releasing its Project xCloud strategy to bridge the gap as it lets gamers save their progress to the cloud and pick up where they left off by opening the app on their phone or tablet. Nintendo, on the other hand, is already mobile-compatible because it’s sleek and transportable. Sony is the only manufacturer not to leverage a mobile gaming element and could pay a hefty price for it if no zero upgrades aren’t released quickly.
Virtual Reality Headset
It’s worth pointing out that Sony is the only manufacturer of the big three that currently sells its own VR headset. The other major players in the game are Oculus and HTC and Valve. Sadly, the standalone hardware isn’t as game-changing as PlayStation owners might expect because it’s a very cheap version compared to the rest of the market.
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For example, each eye gets an RGB display – two displays in total – and it uses an AMD Radeon GPU, which is much slower than the lowest specifications found in the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. This means that while sales of the PSVR are strong – 5 million were sold last year – Oculus, in particular, has caught up in terms of units shipped. A symbol of this is the fact that Oculus was only 500,000 units down in 2019, which isn’t a very big buffer. The bosses at Sony should be slightly concerned because virtual reality technology is an area the company has dominated since 2017. If it loses out to Oculus on this front, and Microsoft and Nintendo on the mobile gaming front, its lead at the top of the video game console sector could finally be in doubt.
That’s the worst-case scenario. Still, Sony will want to strengthen its flagship PlayStation brand with more pressure coming from different regions within the industry, and these are two features that the people in charge should focus on.