Whether you’re a NASCAR driver, a Super Bowl champion or a video game manufacturer, I suppose everyone deserves a victory lap. Let’s all stand back as Sony takes theirs.
In a recent interview, Sony’s president and CEO Shawn Layden hyped a variety of accomplishments for 2014, not the least of which is building the PlayStation 4 into the most dominant piece of next-gen hardware on the market. In regards to where they go from here, he states the “…continued rollout of the platform, 13.5 million is a pretty good achievement for us. As anyone else would say, the first 13.5 million is the easy 13.5 million. We need to continue to push that installed base. We’re in a strong position now. Black Friday is just around the corner. In my neighborhood we heard “Jingle Bells” in the department stores in September, but Black Friday is the real kickoff.”
The “ Share ” functionality is also a unique feature Sony has been heavily touting as of late, revealing gamers have pressed it over 530 million times. While incorporating the button into the controller layout itself might have seemed like an odd move at first, Layden feels it was a smart call in hindsight. “Making a physical button on the controller, as you can imagine, is not an easy decision to take at the time. Otherwise everyone would want a button on it to do something or other. But we felt sharing was the perfect thing to make physical on the controller. In that moment, you don’t want to start pulling down menus and finding out how to capture this or that. You just hit the button and pull it out. That was a definite win for us.” He says.
The compete interview can be found here , which is quite extensive and covers a broad range of topics (including Layden’s history at Sony and more).