Sony is a consumer hardware company, and almost everything else the company has ever been is ultimately in service of that
Microsoft, a software and operating systems company at its inception, approaches the games market by thinking about how to build a competitive advantage through operating systems – famously leapfrogging Sony with online functionality with the Xbox and Xbox 360, and now building its Xbox Series X/S brand around Game Pass services, advanced backwards compatibility, and remarkable OS features like Quick Resume and Smart Delivery. Nintendo, founded as a card and toy company, thinks of its consoles as advanced toys, making it an easy decision to take creative punts on hardware launches because it will be quick to drop low-performing devices, just as a toy company would. Successful companies evolve and change in many ways over time, but path dependence remains a powerful force, so their original DNA persists in their decision making and values. This is a concept that has its roots right back in the earliest days of the PlayStation line, and is deeply interconnected with the nature of Sony's broader business. The biggest thing missing from this way of conceptualising the companies' strategies, though, isn't their overlapping aspects it's that Sony doesn't just view each PlayStation as a monolithic console, but rather as the central component in a wider network of products, be they software, services, or hardware. That's more or less true, although the lines are more blurred than these definitions suggest Sony definitely sees PlayStation as a generation-spanning digital platform to some extent, while Microsoft is clearly invested in the fortunes of the Xbox Series X/S consoles as hardware platforms. When talking about the very different philosophies that Sony and Microsoft have brought to this generation of console hardware – and consequently, to their very different visions for the industry's future – it's often argued that where Microsoft sees Xbox as a software and services platform for which consoles are just one possible access device, Sony sees consoles in a more traditional sense, as a monolithic platform whose software and services orbit a singular piece of hardware. Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox
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