Shawn Layden, former head of PlayStation (Sony Interactive Entertainment), said at the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit that corporations that want to enter the video game market are “barbarians.” In his view, they pose a massive threat to the industry.

Right now, we’re seeing all the big companies saying, ‘Oh, games? They bring in billions of dollars a year? I want a piece of that business.’ And now we have Google, Netflix, Apple, and Amazon wanting their piece and trying to disrupt our industry.

Leyden pointed out that such companies have irreversibly changed other industries. For example, he cited Apple, which “convinced everyone that 99 cents per song was a good idea” and destroyed the music industry. Netflix did a similar thing, according to Layden. It hurt the movie business by luring people from movie theaters to streaming services.

 480