Sony can close the gap between the releases of its PlayStation exclusives and PC ports. Company President Hiroki Totoki suggested in a post-earnings Q&A on Wednesday (through VGC) who wants PlayStation to be “aggressive in improving our margin performance,” with “cross-platform” gaming playing a major role. He clarified in the talk that, by multiplatform, he was referring to PlayStation and PC, not Xbox or Switch.
When asked if Sony's profits were not keeping up with the increase in top line, he said hardware and first-party games were two areas of focus. He noted that hardware cost reduction in this console cycle was “difficult to achieve,” suggesting we won't see any permanent drop in console price.
“I personally believe there are opportunities to improve margin, so I would like to be aggressive in improving our margin performance,” he continued. Totoki hinted that one way to achieve this is to get more out of its (often critically acclaimed and commercially successful) PlayStation Studios titles, such as Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and God of War: Ragnarok.
“In the past, we wanted to popularize consoles, and the main goal of a first-party title was to make the console popular,” Totoki said in the Q&A session. “This is true, but there is a synergy in it, so if you have strong first-party content, not only on our console but also on other platforms, such as computers, a first-party (game) can be developed with cross-platform. and that can help improve operating profits, so that's another aspect we want to work on proactively.”
That's a clear change from PlayStation Studios head Herman Hulst's thoughts in 2022. He then said that PC gamers would have to wait “at least a year” before seeing first-party PlayStation games (minus PlayStation titles). live service) on their computers. God of War (2018) and the first Marvel's Spider-Man had a gap of about four years between the PS4 and PC releases. The last Miles Morales Spinoff We saw a two-year turnaround.
On February 8, Sony released helldivers 2 on PS5 and Windows simultaneously. VGC grades The game led to the highest number of concurrent Steam players on PlayStation Studios: surpassing God of War (2018), The last of us Part I and Horizon Zero Dawn. Helldivers 2 was developed by Arrowhead Games with publishing Sony Interactive Entertainment.
It's unclear if Totoki meant that we can expect future PlayStation stores like the upcoming Wolverine game or the ever-popular Spider-Man, God of War or various Naughty Dog franchises to appear on PC on the same day as the console. But a shift in strategy is underway anyway, and Totoki will have the influence to put the plan into action: He will replace Jim Ryan as interim CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment in April.
