PlayStation Confirms 'Move Away' From Hardware, Gamers Losing Their Minds

Last night, Sony’s vice president confirmed something we’ve all kind of assumed for a while now: PlayStation is no longer interested in being a first-party publisher.

Yesterday, Sony held their Q1 2026 earnings call, which sounds like something that should have been very dry and boring, but is actually something that ended up being extremely interesting (and somewhat divisive).

During the earnings call, Sony’s VP, Sadahiko Hayakawa, was asked about their recent partnership with Bandai Namco, and he revealed that PlayStation is midway through a transition away from a “hardware centric business model”.

Here’s the full quote: "In the gaming business, we are moving away from a hardware centric business model more to a platform business that expands the community and increases engagement."

Earlier in the call, Sony’s chief financial officer, Lin Tao, implied that this transition may be due to an uptick in PlayStation’s “third-party” related sales.

“FY '25 Q1 sales increased 8% year-on-year to JPY 936.5 billion, primarily due to an increase in third-party software sales, partially offset by the negative impact of foreign exchange rates”, Tao revealed.

In short, what this means is that PlayStation is raking in more profits from their third-party software sales than they assumed.

Several first-party PlayStation titles have seen releases on PC over the years, including the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2.

In a surprising development, Helldivers 2 was also recently announced for Xbox Series S/X, implying that Sony has plans to bring several more first-party titles to Xbox down the line.

Over on the r/Games subreddit, several users aren’t too keen on Sony’s new, software-focused approach.

“Sort of feels like the slow death of Playstation. Legitimately only reason to ever get it is because of the exclusives, everything else about them is trash compared to Xbox”, commented user dopeman311.

“More people will just move to PC. I can't even count how many times I've seen people say "I was going to get a PS5 until I noticed all their games come to PC anyways" or something similar. And PS5 sales are actually behind PS4 sales in the same timeframe.”

“Does this mean Nintendo actually won the console wars? It's the last standing company making exclusives and supporting physical games”, replied user Chinchillin09.

Personally, I’m kind of surprised how many people are upset about this.

Sony has been very clear that they’ll be moving away from developing fully exclusive titles for quite some time now, and they’ve clearly been taking notes from Microsoft.

I do think the response is a little bit overblown however, as Nintendo being the “last standing company making exclusives” isn’t something that is going to affect Sony in the slightest (or Microsoft, for that matter).

Sony and Microsoft have always been each other’s direct competition, and Nintendo’s success isn’t something that will impact either of them.