Enthusiastic former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has recently appeared on the Kit & Krysta show and had plenty of interesting nuggets of information to share. One of the things discussed is PlayStation management's interpretation and response to Nintendo. Yoshida shared that Sony really views Xbox as its main competitor, due to their similarity of cutting edge hardware and mature games. He then shared that this view changes when it comes to Japan, where Nintendo is the dominant force in the marketplace.
"Working for PlayStation, their perception of the competition is always Xbox. They see Microsoft being the competition because Xbox is very similar – performance, hardware. Like a high-end console, mature games and Nintendo is very, very different. Nintendo is family-friendly, games for everyone, and not about technology, it's more about having fun with friends and family and always have multiple controllers, bundled with the hardware.
Inside Sony, even when they do a business analysis, Nintendo doesn't show up. So there's a competition market share between PlayStation and Xbox, and somehow they don't included Nintendo – not that they're ignoring Nintendo, but that they do not necessarily feel Nintendo is competition because Nintendo is covering a different audience. In a bigger scale Nintendo is bringing a young audience into gaming and some of them when they grow up might graduate into more mature systems like PlayStation or Xbox. Of course there's huge respect for what Nintendo does in terms of how Nintendo should be doing in the industry. We all felt that it's great to have Nintendo continue to be successful so that we can grow the industry – continue to grow the industry together kind of feeling.
Except for one market – it's Japan. In Japan Nintendo is hugely strong, and Xbox almost doesn't exist. … it's all about Nintendo versus Sony. So PlayStation people working in Japan see Nintendo clearly as competition, but outside Japan PlayStation people clearly see Xbox as a primary competition."
