According to former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida, the company generally did not see Nintendo as a competitor. The only exception was in Japan.
Yoshida discussed PlayStation’s view of Nintendo during an episode of the Kit & Krysta podcast. In most territories, PlayStation viewed Xbox as its main competitor. While PlayStation and Xbox often released similar hardware, Nintendo tends to take a different approach – especially with its recent consoles – and maintains “a different audience.”
Yoshida said the following during the podcast:
Working for PlayStation, their perception of the competition is always Xbox. They see Microsoft as the competitor because Xbox is very similar – performance, hardware. As a high-end console, mature games, and Nintendo is very, very different. Nintendo is family-oriented, games for everyone, and it’s not about technology, it’s more about having fun with friends and family and always having multiple controllers, along with the hardware.
Within Sony, even when doing business analysis, Nintendo doesn’t come up. So there is market competition between PlayStation and Xbox, and in some way they didn’t include Nintendo – not that they are ignoring Nintendo, but they don’t necessarily feel that Nintendo is a competitor, because Nintendo is reaching a different audience. On a larger scale, Nintendo is bringing young people into gaming and some of them, when they grow up, may migrate to more mature systems like PlayStation or Xbox. Of course, there is huge respect for what Nintendo does in terms of how Nintendo should be doing in the industry. We all feel it’s great that Nintendo continues to be successful so that we can grow the industry – continue to grow the industry together.
Except for one market – Japan. In Japan, Nintendo is extremely strong and Xbox hardly exists… it’s all about Nintendo versus Sony. So, the PlayStation folks working in Japan clearly see Nintendo as a competitor, but outside Japan, PlayStation folks clearly see Xbox as the primary competition.
Yoshida’s comments come at an interesting time, given what we saw at the end of last week. Investors raised concerns about Nintendo Switch 2’s impact on PlayStation’s business, so the company responded.
