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Sony Interactive Entertainment
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Sony Interactive Entertainment (Creator)
Pushing the boundaries of play.
Click here to see the logo for PlayStation Studios.

Sony Interactive Entertainment (formerly Sony Computer Entertainment) is a video game company founded by Sony in 1993. Its best known product is the PlayStation line of video game consoles, with which it is considered one of the top powerhouses in the business. It is currently the second largest video game company by market revenue in the world.note 

It went through several changes and renames over the years, with its recent rename being 2016. Its global headquarters was formerly in Tokyo, but since the 2016 restructuring it has been centered in San Mateo, California (the company as a whole still ultimately reports to Tokyo, as Sony's headquarters is in there).

The company's most notable division is PlayStation Studios (formerly SCE Worldwide Studios and SIE Worldwide Studios), an umbrella company watching over Sony's various development studios.

Sony video game consoles:

Home consoles

Handheld consoles

Divisions and subsidiaries:

Active game development studios

Former game development studios

  • 989 Studios (founded in 1995; shut down in 2005)
  • Bigbig Studios (acquired in 2007; shut down in 2012)
  • Bluepoint Games (acquired in 2021; shut down in 2026)
  • Camden Studio (founded in 1998; merged with Team Soho to form London Studio in 2002)
  • Contrail (founded in 1997; absorbed into Sony in 2000)
  • Evolution Studios (acquired in 2007; shut down in 2016)
  • Fabrik Games (acquired in 2021; sold off in 2024)
  • Firewalk Studios (acquired in 2023; shut down in 2024)
  • Guerrilla Cambridge (formerly known as SCE Cambridge Studio, founded in 1997 and restructured in 2010; shut down in 2017)
  • Incognito Entertainment (acquired in 2002; shut down in 2009)
  • Japan Studio (founded in 1993; reconstructed into Team Asobi in 2021)
  • London Studio (founded in 2002; shut down in 2024)
  • Manchester Studio (founded in 2015; shut down in 2020)
  • Neon Koi (formerly Savage Game Studios, acquired in 2022; shut down in 2024)
  • Pixelopus (founded in 2014; shut down in 2023)
  • Sony Imagesoft (founded in 1989, merged with Sony Interactive Entertainment America in 1995)
  • Sony Online Entertainment (founded in 1995; sold off and renamed Daybreak Game Company in 2015)
  • Studio Liverpool (acquired in 1993; shut down in 2012)
  • Team Soho (founded in 1994; merged with Camden Studio to form London Studio in 2002)
  • Zipper Interactive (acquired in 2006; shut down in 2012)

Other subsidiaries

  • Audeze (headset manufacturer, acquired in 2023)
  • Audiokinetic (audio development software company, acquired in 2019)
  • Gaikai (streaming-based software company, acquired in 2012)
  • iSize (AI-based video software company, acquired in 2023)
  • PlayStation Productions (SIE's very own film production studio, formed in 2016 and officially founded in 2019)
  • Repeat.gg (online game tournament platform, acquired in 2022)
  • SN Systems (development tools company, acquired in 2005)

Video games developed and/or published by SIE:

Tropes pertaining to this company:

  • Boring, but Practical:
    • For the longest time, the company has used the exact same controller with only very minor and mostly cosmetic differences between them. They might add some pressure-sensitive buttons here, a home button there, but the core design never changes shape or button layout. While it's not as ambitious as Nintendo who always tries something new and innovative, it's also allowed them to practically perfect it and make a very reliable and overall well-designed device, made it easier for the designers of long-running franchises since the controller's layout remained the same, and allowed gamers to enjoy backward compatibility without having to buy additional controllers, and of course, averted Damn You, Muscle Memory! for years. That said, the fourth and fifth generation iterations marked notable evolutions, with the fourth adding a touch pad, speakers, motion control support and altered the form a bit for a modestly bigger fit, making for the most ergonomic Dual Shock yet. The PlayStation 5 follow-up, the Dual Sense, took it another step further, improving the ergonomics yet again while adding haptic feedback, adaptive triggers and a built-in microphone for online chat.
    • In the fifth console generation, the PlayStation was technically the weakest, lacking the VDP chip and dual processornote  of the Sega Saturn or the Silicon Graphics-developed hardware and hardware z-buffering or floating point polygonal rendering of the Nintendo 64, but it was cheap, had better audio and video functionality, and was easy to develop for, resulting in it easily becoming the best-selling console of the generation.
    • The PlayStation line largely owes its success to this trope. Sony's consoles are often criticized for not innovating in things like controls like Nintendo has with D-pads, analog sticks, touch screens, and motion controls, or online services like Microsoft with Xbox Live. However, as the latter two brands know all too well, with innovation comes risk, and they've had almost as many supposed innovations fail as they have succeeded. Sony, on the other hand, builds consoles that incorporate features that have already proven successful on other consoles, which for the most part have ensured their consistent success and popularity to a great degree while their competitors have seen numerous ups and downs.
  • Genre Turning Point: What the Atari 2600 did for gaming in The '70s and the Nintendo Entertainment System did for it in The '80s, the Sony PlayStation did for it in The '90s. Upon its release in Japan in December 1994, it became the decade's defining home console and the one whose hardware enabled numerous changes to gaming as a whole.
    • It was not the first console to use CDs as opposed to cartridges for its games. Both the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and the Philips CD-i predate itnote , the Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and Atari Jaguar had CD drive peripherals released during their lifetimes, and the Sega Saturn beat Sony to the punch by one month. It was the PlayStation, however, whose combination of a CD drive and advanced graphical hardware showed just how much optical media could expand what gaming was capable of. Its audio capabilities especially caused the PlayStation to lead a revolution in sound design in gaming in the late '90s, particularly with the rise of voice acting and music, as it became possible to fit voice lines for every character and music that wasn't compressed into a MIDI format onto a single disc. The smaller size and lower cost of discs compared to large, proprietary cartridges, when combined with the PlayStation's pioneering use of a memory card to store saved game data separately from the game itself, also allowed developers to make games that spanned multiple discs. The epic Japanese RPGs that the PlayStation became famous for couldn't have been made on the hardware from just one generation prior, a fact that Squaresoft realized when they ditched Nintendo (which still used cartridges for the Nintendo 64) and made their games exclusive to Sony's console.
    • It also did this with its controller. While the Super NES controller set the standard for video game controllers in 1990, in 1997 the new Dual Analog controller for the PlayStation, and especially its more famous successor the DualShock, perfected it. It wasn't the first default gamepad (as in, the one packed in with the console itself, not an add-on) to have full analog control, nor was it the first controller built with ergonomics in mind rather than being shaped like a rectangular brick — the Nintendo 64 beat it to the punch in both regards. However, by having two analog sticks, character and camera control in a 3D environment were greatly simplified. Not only has it remained in basic service through five generations of PlayStations and counting with only minor changes to its basic designnote , but every controller since from Microsoft and Nintendo (save for the Wiimote, which when used as a regular controller is a throwback to the original NES controller with a D-pad and two face buttons) has been heavily influenced by its layout of "two analog sticks for each thumb, a D-pad on the left, four face buttons on the right, and two trigger buttons for each index finger".
  • Pressure-Sensitive Interface:
    • PlayStation 2: The controller features pressure-sensitive buttons for its DualShock 2 controllers. In theory, this allowed a single button press to be either light or heavy, and for games to react accordingly. All in all, the idea is Awesome, but Impractical due to being so difficult to get the hang of, so the feature gets dropped for the PS4. It's also something of an Underused Game Mechanic as, most of the time, only one or two of the buttons (out of eight) will have this functionality tapped into, and many players considered it a Scrappy Mechanic due to inconsistent differences in how much pressure is required between different functions of one button.
    • PlayStation 3: Its controller is similar to the DualShock 2 save for the L2 and R2 buttons being pressure-sensitive triggers. This has caused porting issues with the gameplay of DC Universe Online.

Alternative Title(s): Sony Computer Entertainment

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