PlayStation bosses say they want to work more 'proactively' on PC releases, and it sure sounds like Sony is gearing up for more simultaneous debuts like Helldivers 2
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
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