Although he stepped down from his position as Chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2019, Shawn Layden hasn’t been shy about sharing his views about the future of the gaming industry. And the former PlayStation boss believes that that the ongoing conflict of rival consoles between Sony and Microsoft should come to a close.
During an interview with Eurogamer, Layden likens the PlayStation and Xbox competition to the format wars between VHS and Sony’s Betamax decades earlier, which was won by the former before both formats became obsolete.
“With Xbox versus PlayStation, the Ali versus Frazier fight… Frankly, we have to start interrogating what the purpose is of a proprietary console, and whether that can continue to be true,” said Layden. “When you have competing formats, competing platforms, competing technologies, there comes a time when we all declare the war is over… But the real competition will be on its content. And content should be the competition for publishers, not which hardware you get behind. I think we’re at a point where the console becomes irrelevant in the next… if not the next generation then the next next generation definitely.”
While Microsoft has been testing the waters by releasing a few Xbox games on PlayStation 5–including the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle–Layden doesn’t see a need for Sony to reciprocate by bringing PS5 games to Xbox.
“Should PlayStation, with that huge market lead and the momentum, apparently, going forward, should they build versions of their games to run on a competing platform of much smaller size and scale? As the saying goes, I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze,” related Layden. “You know the Sony fanbase gets really upset whenever a game comes out on PC, 18 months after the original release on PlayStation… And if that’s what they’re going to say about a PC release, just imagine what the market would say about Xbox releases from PlayStation Studios.”
Layden has previously remarked that he believes the rival consoles have “reached a ceiling” and shouldn’t fight “over teraflops.” Sony has reportedly already made made some early moves to line up its PlayStation 6 chips, while the specs for the next Xbox remain a topic of speculation for now. While both consoles are years away, Microsoft and Sony apparently also share ambitions of making new portable systems as well.