Not that long ago, a typical American household might have been full of Sony devices. There was probably a Walkman or a Discman lying around, not to mention Sony boomboxes, VCRs, stereos, televisions and a list that went on and on.

These days, most household Sony collections have been whittled to a single product: a PlayStation gaming console.

As it prepares to start selling its fifth major game console in 25 years on Thursday, Sony has largely become the PlayStation company. Just as the $160 billion video game industry has outstripped film and music in the global market, the business that Sony started in the 1990s is now its biggest, most profitable division.

Sony bore major responsibility for popularizing entertainment technologies, from the transistor radio to the color television to the cassette tape to the compact disc. Yet the company then squandered opportunities in digital music, smartphones and televisions, leaving PlayStation its most important and powerful link to everyday consumers.

“We’ve had a tough time,” Kenichiro Yoshida, Sony’s chairman and chief executive, said in an interview last week. But the gaming business, he said, has helped the company regain its footing.

Yoshida helped begin a wrenching transformation of Sony’s culture and business model about six years ago when he became chief financial officer. He cut costs, took huge write-downs in the smartphone division and got out of PCs and mass-market televisions.

Sony’s shares are up more than elevenfold since 2012, profits have risen, and the company is still one of Japan’s largest, with about 110,000 employees and a market value around $108 billion.

“Entertainment, led by gaming, is Sony’s new face, the company’s new growth driver,” said Kota Ezawa, a Citigroup analyst in Tokyo. “There has been a clear statement and direct change in direction by Ken Yoshida to move Sony from a traditional electronics business of selling boxes to a business selling entertainment.”

Over the first half of Sony’s current fiscal year, the gaming division generated more than 27% of the company’s revenue and about 42% of its operating income. Sony’s electronics business, by contrast, accounted for 20% of revenue and only 8% of operating income.

After gaming and electronics, the company’s largest segments are its image-sensor business — which sells advanced camera chips to companies including Apple and Huawei — and financial services, which include a significant Japanese insurance provider. Sony’s music and Hollywood divisions are its smallest, but have remained relatively profitable in recent years.

“The way that PlayStation has risen above consumer electronics and become the core business of Sony really reflects the shift in how people are engaging in the modern world,” said Damian Thong, a Macquarie analyst in Tokyo. “Many Japanese conglomerates have struggled with this.”

The new PlayStation 5 has been reviewed favorably in the face of formidable competition from a new generation of Xbox game machines introduced Tuesday by Microsoft.

The companies are pursuing different strategies. While Microsoft has attracted more than 15 million users to its Netflix-like game subscription service, Sony is relying on a more traditional retail sales model and the popularity of exclusive new games like Demon’s Souls and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

Ezawa, the Citigroup analyst, estimated that Sony might initially lose as much as $100 on each $500 PS5 it sells, though the loss is expected to shrink as manufacturing efficiency improves.

That’s normal in the top-end console business. Sony and Microsoft each appear to initially sell their gaming hardware at a loss and make profits down the road by selling game software and extracting licensing fees from independent publishers. Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at Ampere Analysis, forecasts that Sony will sell 5 million PS5s this year while Microsoft will move 3.9 million new Xboxes.

Sony attributes much of its success over the last console generation to the popularity of its exclusive game franchises, including stalwarts like God of War (more than 51 million copies sold) and newcomers like Ghost of Tsushima, with more than 5 million copies sold since its debut in July.

Neither Yoshida nor Jim Ryan, the British man who runs the global PlayStation business, grew up in the company’s content operations. Yoshida ran Sony’s unglamorous Japanese internet service provider for many years while Ryan built PlayStation’s operational ground game around the world — a major component of the brand’s success.

After working at Ford Motor Co. and the software company Oracle, Ryan joined Sony in 1994 just as it was preparing to introduce the original PlayStation in Europe.

The second PlayStation, released in 2000, was a hit (and remains the world’s bestselling game console) propelled by Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto III and Sony’s expansion into new geographic markets.

The PlayStation 4, released in 2013, dominated the competition, selling more than twice as many units as Microsoft’s Xbox One. That victory gave Sony the financial breathing room it needed to mount a revival and perhaps become a beacon for the broader Japanese electronics industry.

Yoshida has described the PlayStation business and its focus on hard-core gamers as “something of a niche.” That’s because Sony has little presence in either PC or mobile gaming, which together make up about three-quarters of the global game business.

But “niches can be very profitable, and that’s what Sony is focused on,” said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies. “They’re not trying to compete with Microsoft and Xbox across the board.”