Sony president and PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki has spoken of the opportunities available in its approach to releasing first-party games on PC, saying it’s “proactively [working] on” bringing more titles to other platforms as part of an “aggressive” profit margin growth plan.
Totoki made the comments during an investor Q&A coinciding with Sony’s latest financial earnings report. When asked how its gaming division might be looking to increase profits, he first discussed the difficulty of cost reduction in PlayStation hardware, given component pricing, before highlighting a “multiplatform” approach to its first-party game releases as a potentially more fruitful area of expansion.
“In the past, as you all know,” Totoki explained, “we wanted to popularise [our] console, and the first-party title’s main purpose was to make the console popular.”
“It is true,” he continued, “but there is a synergy to it. So if you have strong first-party content, not only with our console but also other platforms like computers, a first party can be grown with multiplatform – and that can help operating profit to improve. So that is another one we want to proactively work on.”
“I personally think there are opportunities out there for improvement of margins,” he added, “so I would like to go aggressive in improving our margin performance.”
Under former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who announced his depature from the company last September, Sony’s approach has been to release its games first as console exclusives before bringing them to PC “at least a year” later – some live-service games excepted. It’s unclear if Totoki (the interim CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment while a replacement for Ryan is sought) might be looking to close that gap to capitalise on the initial hype cycle for PlayStation releases, or if his words are merely an extension of Sony’s previous claim PC and mobile would account for 50 percent of its first-party portfolio by 2025.
Sony has, of course, seen significant success with its PlayStation game releases on PC – which have so far included the likes of God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves – but its biggest PC success to date has been Helldivers 2, which launched last week as a simultaneous release on PS5 and Steam.