Sony pulls out of CES 2027 in a first since 1967
Neither Sony nor its affiliates will exhibit in Las Vegas next January, and the company says its attention has moved to entertainment, intellectual property and the people who make things.
Sony is sitting out CES. The company will not attend the Consumer Electronics Show in 2027, and neither will its affiliates, making it the first absence for Sony since the expo's inaugural event in 1967. A Sony spokesperson told Bloomberg that the call reflects the company's current focus on “entertainment, intellectual property, and technology geared to support creators”, adding: “We continuously and strategically evaluate our approach to events and communications based on the needs and priorities of our diverse business.”
Las Vegas in January has been Sony's stage for its biggest swings for years. Former PlayStation chief Jim Ryan used the CES 2020 keynote to reveal the PlayStation 5 logo, and the 2022 show was where Sony announced PlayStation VR2 and Horizon: Call of the Mountain. By contrast, the most recent show was already thin on the ground: no booth, but a presentation of Afeela, the electric vehicle Sony builds with Honda.
Sony has been leaving the floor for a while
This is less a sudden exit than the end of a slow walk. Sony has not attended Gamescom since 2019 and now puts its game announcements through digital State of Play broadcasts rather than a hall with a queue outside it. Rival platform holders went the other way this year — Nintendo ran two Gamescom booths, a stage and a playable area — and GamesIndustry.biz reports the exhibition floor was fully booked, with organisers describing demand as higher than ever.
The odd part is how little Sony's product roadmap has changed alongside it. The company still ships PlayStation hardware, still sells image sensors to half the phone industry, still has a car programme with Honda, and still wants to be seen as a company built around creators. What it no longer needs is a January keynote slot to say so.
Our opinion
Read the statement closely and the interesting word is “evaluate” — a verb that leaves the door open for 2028 without committing to anything. Sony has spent the last decade turning itself into an entertainment company that happens to make hardware, and a 60-year streak of CES appearances is exactly the kind of ritual that becomes optional once your revenue leans on games, music and film rather than televisions. Skipping the show is not a retreat from consumer electronics; it is a statement that the announcement calendar is now a cost, not an asset.
The harder question is what happens to CES itself. A show that built its reputation on the companies that defined each era of consumer hardware just lost the one that defined the Walkman, the Trinitron and the PlayStation, and it did so quietly, in a statement to a wire service rather than a press conference. European buyers and press, who fly to Vegas every January on the promise that the year's big reveals will be there, should start asking who the marquee names are now. If the answer is mostly car makers and sensor suppliers, the industry's real calendar has already moved somewhere else — and it will not be moving back.