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Creator / Sony

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/sony_logo.png
We are Sony. (Ding!)note 

The Sony Group Corporation is a multinational media and electronics conglomerate based in Tokyo, Japan. Sony is best known for having created, among other things:

Originally founded in 1946 under the name Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (the Sony name was invented as the name of a product line in the '50s, became the company's brand overseas at first and finally the name of the company itself by 1980) maker of numerous diverse electronic goods, prominently including televisions, stereos, PCs, and cell phones, and game consoles. They also do electronic components, industrial chemicals, batteries, toys, robots, banks, and life insurance. They also have their own animation studios (Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Pictures Animation, Adelaide Productions and A-1 Pictures), their own major record company with numerous labels and even their own Anime channel co-founded with Toei Animation, TMS and Sunrise, an anime streaming site called Daisuki (co-founded not only with Toei, Sunrise and TMS, but also Nihon Ad Systems, Dentsu and Asatsu-DK, now defunct). One could almost say that, like one of their products, they only do everything[[note]] including lawsuits against effects studios for similar movies; and getting entangled with Korean electronics company LG for Blu-ray rights. Basically, even if you don't own Sony-manufactured electronics, you've likely watched Sony-produced movies (and/or owned them on tape or disc), listened to Sony-distributed music on your phone, and you've watched Sony-produced TV series, like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!.

It is also the current owner of Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures as part of their Sony Pictures Entertainment division, which along with their record company (Sony Music, owner of Columbia Records and Epic Records) has led the company to switch sides in the intellectual-property war. Said record company, SME, has the dubious distinction of being the only major record company to ship a rootkit (malignant software which takes over your computer) on a music CD, all in the name of the war on piracy. In 2017, Sony purchased a majority interest in North American anime dubbing and distribution company Funimation. In 2021, Sony acquired Crunchyroll and later rebranded Funimation as Crunchyroll. They also had their own streaming service, Sony Crackle (sold in 2021 to Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, though it continues to stream Sony's library content), as well as ownership stakes in several cable and digital broadcast channels (most notably GSN, which launched utilizing Sony's vast library of game shows.... which they rarely use now.)

It's worth noting that Sony Group Corporation (via Sony Corporation, previously known as Sony Electronics) per se only does the electronics and some financial shenanigans. Most of the fingers Sony sticks in other pies are technically independent corporations— Sony Interactive Entertainment (games), Sony Pictures Entertainment (film and television), Sony Music Entertainment (music), Sony Financial Holdings, etc. That's before getting into Sony Corporation of America, Sony de Mexico, Sony of Canada, Sony Europe, Sony (UK) etc... There are dozens of Sony corporations in total (Wikipedia has a full list). One upshot of this is that Sony has been known on more than one occasion to sue "itself" when conflicts arose between, for instance, Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Corporation. Or take different sides of a political issue, such as during the SOPA fiasco, Sony Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Sony Music Entertainment were for it while Sony Computer Entertainment was against it.

Sony's also had a bad habit of creating storage formats that only they tend to actually use; the Betamax is the most infamous of these, but the MiniDisc, the PSP's UMD and the SD Card competitor MemoryStick have also been affected by the lack of non-Sony usage and interest. The MS format was perhaps the most prolific of these formats as Sony built MS slots into seemingly everything they made in the mid-2000s, including their Cybershot cameras and Handycam camcorders, VAIO PCs, TV sets, mobile devices (including their Clie PDAs and mylo web gadgets) and PlayStation game consoles. They've since admitted defeat and make SD Cards like everyone else.

Notable divisions and subsidiaries of the Sony Group (with articles on this wiki) include:

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 4th and 5th generation iterations marked notable evolutions, with the 4th 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 5th 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 Corporation

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