Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida has revealed that Sony Interactive doesn’t consider Nintendo to be competition. Xbox has been PlayStation’s primary competitor for a long time, at least from an outside perspective, given the similarities in console releases and target audience between the companies. Still, it may be surprising to hear that another Japanese gaming giant doesn’t even appear in PlayStation market reports.
Since leaving Sony, Yoshida has remained vocal about his thoughts on the gaming industry. In April, Yoshida called the Switch 2 Direct “underwhelming,” although he did praise the console’s social features and said he appreciated the announcement of FromSoftware’s The Duskbloods. Now, he’s revealed that PlayStation as a whole may not be too concerned with whether Nintendo presentations are underwhelming or not.
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In an appearance on the Kit & Krysta podcast, Yoshida claimed that “Nintendo doesn’t show up” in Sony business analyses. He went on to say that it’s not that PlayStation is outright ignoring the company, but that Sony leaders “do not necessarily feel that Nintendo is competition” because they cover a different audience. Yoshida touched on Nintendo’s more family-friendly image and said the younger gamers it caters to may become interested in more mature PlayStation consoles and games when they grow up, leading to the lack of perceived competition. At the same time, though, the Switch 2 recently broke the PS4’s first-week sales record in the U.S., so Nintendo certainly seems like a competitor in the console market.
Shuhei Yoshida Says PlayStation Respects Nintendo But Doesn’t Consider It Competition
Yoshida clarified that Sony has “huge respect for what Nintendo does,” but that it still focuses on Xbox as its primary rival. Many gamers may agree with the sentiment, as Nintendo does have a reputation for appealing to a younger audience, even if mature games have long been a part of its console’s lineup. It may also be worth considering how much Xbox has encroached on PlayStation’s territory. Industry analysts say Xbox has made hundreds of millions by releasing former exclusives on PS5, and several recent bestsellers on the PlayStation Store are from Microsoft-owned studios.
During the interview, Yoshida also mentioned there is an exception to PlayStation’s focus on Xbox. According to Yoshida, Nintendo is Sony’s main competitor in Japan, as Xbox “almost doesn’t exist” in the Japanese market, whereas Nintendo is “huge” in the country. At the same time, the Nintendo Switch surpassed the PS2 as the bestselling console in the U.S. late last year, so competition could be growing among all major video game companies globally.