Boy, it’s great to play on PC, isn’t it? It’s like the medieval Baghdad of videogames: everything from everywhere eventually passes through here, with all sorts of so-called console exclusives from both sides of the Sony/Microsoft divide making the leap to our neutral platform of choice. Nintendo remains in its well-fortified compound, I suppose, but some things never change.
And following a recent Q&A at a Sony financial results briefing (imperfect transcript here), it sounds like things might be getting even better for us when it comes to PlayStation games making the leap to PC. Sony president and PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki was asked about the corporation’s plans to improve its bottom line, and he had a clear answer: more first-party Sony games on non-Sony platforms like PC.
Noting that cost of manufacturing consoles is going up, eating into Sony’s profit margins on every PS5 sold, Totoki said that one potential profit driver was “first-party title generation,” business-speak for Sony’s in-house games like Spider-Man and God of War. “In the past, as you all know, we wanted to popularise consoles, and a first-party title’s main purpose was to make the console popular.”
“But there is a synergy to it,” continued Totoki, “If we have strong first-party content, not only with our console, but also other platforms like computers, the first-party can be grown with multi-platform, and that can help operating profit to improve. So that’s another one we want to proactively work on… we’d like to go aggressive on improving our margin performance.”
Well, isn’t that interesting? To be sure, it’s no surprise that Sony’s happy with the performance of its games on PC (to the extent that Totoki specifically called out “computers” in his answer): the corporation is making a ton of money off them, after all. But words like “proactive” and “aggressive” make it sound like PlayStation might be ready to narrow the gap between its games’ console releases and their subsequent PC versions.
In the past, Sony bosses have said PC players can expect to wait “two or three years” between a game hitting PlayStation and coming to PC, but with the recent stonking success of Helldivers 2 and its simultaneous release on PS5 and Steam, I have to wonder if Sony isn’t thinking very hard about the extent to which it can close that gap (without infuriating PlayStation fans who forked over the money for their console and the timed exclusives thereon, anyway).
Sony is, of course, not alone in asking itself these questions. Xbox boss Phil Spencer is set to address the faithful in a podcast later today, where he’s widely expected to announce some kind of seismic shift in Microsoft’s gaming strategy, possibly in the form of Xbox games on PlayStation.
If, as Totoki says, the margins in the console business are just getting narrower, the big numbers its PC releases keep spitting out must look better than ever. Perhaps it won’t be too long before releases like Helldivers are the norm and not the exception. Heck, maybe we’ll finally even get Bloodb- no. No. I’m sorry. I can’t even joke about it at this point. Some things are just too good to ever happen.
