By Nelson Schneider - 09/06/25 at 11:48 PM CT
During its Summer financial briefing, Sony’s Senior Vice President announced that the company will be gradually changing the PlayStation division’s entire business model. “We are moving away from a hardware-centric business model more to a platform business that expands the community and increases engagement,” he said.
Based on this statement from one of the top men at Sony Corporate, it seems like PlayStation’s days may be numbered, at least when it comes to being a physical box connected to a TV. Following in Microsoft’s footsteps with the Xbox Division, Sony began to dabble in releasing its (very expensive to make) first-party titles on platforms besides PlayStation consoles in 2021, when it began publishing games on Steam. Now, the one-time Console Warrior even seems interested in pushing its software onto competing consoles, as this Summer it also posted a job listing for a “Multiplatform and Account Management Senior Director,” who would be responsible for bringing PlayStation brand games to the Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox devices (if, indeed, there are any Xbox devices in the future).
It seems that Sony got the message that making modern games and game consoles is REALLY costly, and a console maker can’t make profits off of hardware like they used to, and thus need to depend on games being profitable while selling consoles at break-even or loss-leader margins. Of course, games are also more expensive to make than ever (at least if you do it the way a huge, multi-national corporation imagines that things must be done), so selling those games only to the people who also bought your unprofitable console is not going to make those lines on the quarterly reports keep going up.
Personally, I think it was only a matter of time before the console warriors gave up the ghost and went fully third-party. Microsoft’s Xbox hardware has NEVER been a selling point, and Sony’s last three PlayStations have all been complete and utter failures when compared to their first two PlayStations – and were, not coincidentally, the three most-PC-like and least-console-like devices they’ve ever made. So why wouldn’t both companies shelve the unsuccessful, unprofitable headache of owning and operating a hardware platform in order to simply run an “engaging community” that effectively lives in The Cloud and can run on whatever hardware end users already own?
Of course, there IS a major downside to Sony’s desire to exit hardware: Televisions. Sony’s Bravia line of TVs are the crem-de-la-crem of gaming screens, both for Console Peasants and Glorious PC Master Racists (at least those who don’t force themselves to sit at a desk and play games with a typewriter). Sony’s VP hinted that the company is also planning to shift away from “output devices” like TVs to “creative” devices like digital cameras. In a world where only a handful of companies make high-quality TVs, and Sony’s are the BEST hands-down, it would be incredibly foolish for them to pivot into making digital cameras – devices that are about as relevant as fax machines, considering that everyone with a smartphone already has a decent digital camera in their pocket at all times.
Regardless, if both Xbox and PlayStation cease to exist as hardware platforms with the coming of the 10th Generation, leaving Nintendo as the Cheese Who Stands Alone with the Switch 2… nothing of value will have been lost. Valve has taken up the slack in allowing PC gaming to compete directly with the Switch 2 on even footing with the Steam Deck, actually has plans to move the needle on Virtual Reality with the rumored-for-this-November release of the Deckard and Roy headset and controller, and has built an open-source operating system specifically for platform agnostic gaming (sure, Steam is the intended gaming platform for SteamOS, but the only thing preventing the use of competing platforms is those platforms’ unwillingness to create Linux versions of their clients). With Valve’s open-source contributions to platform agnostic gaming, we’re also seeing upstart platforms like Bazzite Linux coming out of the woodwork, with baked-in support not only for Steam but for competing game-organizing software platforms like Lutris, the Heroic Games Launcher, and – of course – the omnipresent emulator, Libretro. When Xbox and PlayStation finally shed their physical forms and ascend, it looks like those of us left behind will get to enjoy the freest, most open, and truly Gamer-centric gaming ever.
