Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida Thinks Consoles Are Far From Doomed

Everyone’s favourite video gaming analyst, Michael Pachter, has claimed the current console generation will be the last, which ruffled quite a few feathers among console players and industry figures. Today, Shuhei Yoshida, the President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, directly addressed Pachter’s predictions during a livestreamed panel at EGX:

“Michael is fun to listen to, right? (laughs)

[…]

We look at all of these analyst reports, and every year, from the same company, the forecast changes hugely, because of the things that happen in the year before. They change their prediction dramatically.

I don’t, you know, mind hearing something like that, because it’s so interesting… Consoles were announced dead for the longest time. Even at the time when PlayStation One was being worked on, some analyst said that PC games would dominate in the future and there would be no place for home consoles.

Every time these things are proven wrong, and as long as we have passionate people wanting to continue to play on game consoles, we wll try hard to continue, and even make it bigger for the future.”

This is certainly a polarizing topic and there are legitimate arguments on both sides. Console sales are quite impressive, but there is a distinct lack of first-party-exclusives and over-reliance on HD remasters. Furthermore, the future is clearly digital and offsetting the processing power to the cloud. While I don’t think consoles will completely disappear, they might alter into a streaming device without any physical media.

Do you think the days of traditional consoles are numbered?

Thank you DualShockers for providing us with this information.