Although Sony is still unable to meet the demand for its Playstation 5 game console, the group wants to use the industry’s corona boom with its new Inzone brand to sell more hardware to PC gamers. The first products are headphones and monitors.
In a change of strategy, Sony wants to do more business with PC gamers in the future beyond the Playstation. Under the new Inzone brand, the Japanese group presented a range of models consisting of three headphones and two monitors.
“The gaming market is very interesting for us,” says the head of the electronics division, Kazuo Kii. Sony is entering a market that is already divided between many incumbents. That’s why you give yourself two to three years to “be in a good position,” says Kii.
Even if some Playstation users are allowed to buy the new devices, they are primarily intended for “serious PC gamers”. Sony hopes for the expertise in sound and display technology to convince the new customers. This includes the implementation of a 3D sound environment, where sounds can come from different directions according to the gameplay. In the format war over the technology, Sony admits the limits of its own assertiveness: instead of the in-house development 360 Reality Audio, the headphones rely on the Dolby Atmos standard, which Apple and Amazon, for example, also use for their 3D music offerings. Future devices like speakers would support both standards, says Kii.
The already rapidly growing video games market received another powerful boost in the corona pandemic. At the same time, Sony felt the effects of the global semiconductor bottlenecks: the new Playstation 5 released in autumn 2020 is still hard to come by in some cases. In the electronics business, too, he still sees no improvement in the shortage of components, says Kii. Sony has now released several of its once-exclusive Playstation games on PC, including titles like God of War and Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Sony manager Kii, who is also responsible for the TV business, expects that TVs with a sharper picture thanks to the higher 8K resolution with more pixels will eventually prevail against today’s HD or 4K models. Another stumbling block is the technology for the production and transmission of 8K content, which means significantly larger amounts of data. To improve image quality, Sony also relies on real-time analysis of the content on the display in order to present individual objects in the best possible way.
