Sony president and PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki was asked in a Q&A session following Sony's latest financial results briefing why the game division is seeing an increase in gross income but not profits and what the company could do to improve its bottom line. Totoki said that there are two key areas he wants to focus on in this regard: hardware and first-party games.
Hardware is in a tough place, as Totoki notes that "cost reduction in this console cycle is really difficult to come by", which doesn't sound like we can expect discounts in that department anytime soon. He mused: "How can we, given the situation, put our product lines together to make it affordable, without relying on steep discounts, to reasonably sell them to continue our commercial journey on a sustainable basis?"
The solution, it seems, is taking Sony's first-part titles "multi-platform", by which Totoki appears to mean PC specifically. He explains: "In the past, we wanted to popularise consoles, and a first-party title's main purpose was to make the console popular". Times are changing, however, which the PlayStation chairman acknowledges, and it appears that Sony is prepared to change with them, elaborating:
"This is true, but there's a synergy to it, so if you have strong first-party content – not only on our console but also other platforms, like computers – a first-party [game] can be grown with multi-platform, and that can help operating profit to improve, so that's another one we want to work on proactively. I personally think there are opportunities out there for improvement of margin, so I would like to go aggressive on improving our margin performance."
While not a first-party studio (yet), developer Arrowhead Game Studio''s latest, Helldivers 2, was published by Sony and released simultaneously on PS5 and PC last week and appears to have been an unexpected success. Here's hoping the firm learns a thing or two for a first-party release and allocates sufficient network infrastructure the next time a game goes day and date.