Sony wants its PlayStation-exclusive games to come to PC sooner

Sony may be closing the gap between PlayStation exclusives and PC ports.Company President Hiroki Totoki suggested during a post-earnings Q&A call on Wednesday (via gas chromatography) He hopes PlayStation can “aggressively improve our profit performance,” with “multi-platform” games playing an important role. He clarified during his speech that by multi-platform he meant PlayStation and PC, not Xbox or Switch.

When asked about Sony’s profits not keeping up with total revenue growth, he said hardware and first-party games are two focus areas. He noted that hardware cost reductions this console cycle are “difficult to achieve,” suggesting we won’t see any permanent drops in console prices.

“I personally think there are opportunities to improve margins, so I want to aggressively improve our margin performance,” he continued. Totoki hinted that one way to achieve this is to generate more revenue from PlayStation Studios’ games, which are often critically acclaimed and commercially successful, such as Marvel Spider-Man 2 and God of War: Ragnarok.

“In the past, we wanted to popularize consoles, and the main purpose of first-party games was to make consoles popular,” Totoki said in a Q&A. “That’s true, but there are synergies, so if you have strong first-party content – not just on our consoles, but also on other platforms like PC – first-party content [game] You can grow through multiple platforms, which can help improve operating profits, so that’s another thing we want to actively work on. “

This is a clear shift from PlayStation Studios head Herman Hulst’s thinking in 2022. He said at the time that PC gamers would have to wait “at least a year” before seeing first-party PlayStation games on their computers (excluding live-service games). God of War(2018) and the first Marvel’s Spider-Man There was about four years between the PS4 and PC releases.The latter Miles Morales spin-off Saw a transformation in about two years.

On February 8, Sony launched Hellraiser 2 Works on both PS5 and Windows. gas chromatography Pointing out the game led to PlayStation Studios setting a record for highest number of concurrent players on Steam — beat god of war (2018), The last of us part one and horizon zero dawn. Hellraiser 2 is developed by Arrowhead Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

It’s unclear whether Totoki means we can expect future PlayStation staples like the upcoming Wolverine game or the popular Spider-Man, God of War or various Naughty Dog franchises to appear on PC on the same day as the console. Regardless, a strategic shift is underway, and Totoki will be well-positioned to put the plan into action: He succeeded Jim Ryan as interim CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment in April.