Sony is continuing its dominance in the video gaming sector as it beat out rival Microsoft for the fifth consecutive month as video games are seeing a massive resurgence of late.
The Japanese company, which has thrown much of its weight behind the PlayStation 4 and its success, believes its platform will help to continue to make gaming a mainstream endeavor after years in the doldrums.
Overall sales of gaming devices are not published by the big three, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, but according to reports, "new video game hardware were up substantially from May 2013; consoles and portables combined for $187 million in sales, a 95 percent increase over the $96 million in sales during the same period last year."
Sony has been extremely positive on its PS4, which it introduced in North America in November 2013, and recently talked about how profitable it believes the platform is and will continue to be in the future.
CEO Kazuo Hirai says the future will be bright for the company, and singled out the PlayStation 4 as the company's backbone and future. He was talking at a company strategic meeting that was reported by Japanese local media.
Hirai said "it is likely that PS4 will become the platform which exceeds the profits earned with PS2," alluding to the massive appeal and success of its PS2 system, which lived as the flagship gaming system for more than a decade, but was discontinued in early 2013.
"Going forward, we will use streaming to deliver the PlayStation experience worldwide," he said. "We also plan to make PlayStation Now compatible with new Bravia LCD TVs to be launched in the U.S. market this year. And in the future, we intend to extend its availability to a wide range of networked devices." PlayStation Now is Sony's game streaming service, now in beta and set to roll out this summer.
Gaming appears to be getting a huge boost of late, after a lengthy period of decline that saw the big three lose out on the market. If it is rebounding now, it could be positive for the sector as Sony and others hope to continue to roll out new games for their respective devices.
Without official statistics however, it is continuing to be difficult to gauge the overall revenue for the gaming sector and whether Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are seeing an overall push from consumers as the summer hits.
