Former exec says PlayStation didn’t view Nintendo as competition, except in Japan

According to former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida, the company generally didn’t think of Nintendo as competition. The only exception to this is in Japan, where the Big N dominates.

Yoshida was speaking about PlayStation’s view of Nintendo during a Kit & Krysta podcast episode. In most territories, it’s Xbox that PlayStation thought of as its biggest challenger. Whereas PlayStation and Xbox have often released similar hardware, Nintendo tends to take a different approach – especially with its last few systems – 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 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.”

Yoshida’s remarks come at an interesting time given what we saw at the end of last week. Investors brought up concerns about Nintendo Switch 2 impacting PlayStation’s business, so the company responded with a number of comments.