Former PlayStation CEO, Shawn Layden spoke against Sony ending physical media and shed light on the concerns about game ownership in a digital-only future🚀
“If you don't own it, what are you buying?”
He added that this decision will be “a significant brand hit” and a “reputation bite” for PlayStation.
He went on to list the benefits of collecting and showing off your collection of games, and highlighted the very real concern about ownership:
“I think this is probably the more insidious aspect to it, is that it changes the conversation [to] ‘do you own a game or do you have access to a digital asset.
If you can’t sell a thing, that means you don’t own a thing. And if you don’t own it, then what are you buying? If you’re buying access, that doesn’t quite sound as sexy, to be honest. And people, as people tend to do, in their mind they’ll game out the worst case scenario.
And that’s a whole lot of brand hit and reputation bite that – as I said, I don’t have any visibility on the financials around it – but that’s a significant brand hit, and I hope it made sense to them.”
Once again, much respect to Layden as he proves to understand gamers and their concerns, rather than purely pleasing investors.
Him and Shuhei Yoshida would make great CEOs for Sony and probably are the only ones who can steer it back to what once was an unquestionably great entity at the top of the industry🥺
NO DISC 💿 NO BUY