How Sony is blending games, movies and VR into the same ecosystem | Jake Zim interview

venturebeat.com:

Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22-23. Register here.

There aren’t many media and entertainment companies like Sony. The company’s PlayStation 5 console is still a market leader in consoles. It’s branching into PC games, and it just launched the PlayStation VR 2. On top of that, Sony’s The Last of Us has become a massive hit as television series on HBO.

Heck, in a couple of years, maybe we’ll be playing games in our Sony electric cars.

To Jake Zim, senior vice president of virtual reality at Sony Pictures, this is a unique point in time in the history of gaming. He started diving into VR eight years ago, and it’s nice to see some pay off with new generations of headsets and increasing sales of VR titles. Now the walls are coming down between VR, games, movies and other media. It’s like a single ecosystem.

And one of these days, all of these businesses are likely going to make up a pretty good metaverse experience. I caught up with Zim for a recent interview to talk about this at the Dice Summit in Las Vegas. This kind of theme is what we’ll be talking about at our GamesBeat Summit 2023 event on May 22-23 in Los Angeles.

GamesBeat Summit 2023

Join the GamesBeat community in Los Angeles this May 22-23. You’ll hear from the brightest minds within the gaming industry to share their updates on the latest developments.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Can you tell me about your background? How long have you been doing this?

Jake Zim: I’m the senior vice president of virtual reality at Sony Pictures. I’ve been at Sony for 12 years. Before that I was at Fox and Lionsgate movie studios. I started in digital marketing, that intersection of new technologies and