While Xbox is expected to speak this evening to enlighten the community on its intentions regarding the brand's exclusives, the president of Sony recently took a position that closely resembles the Xbox strategy of recent years.
Sony wants PlayStation to make more margin
It was during a question and answer session after the announcement of its latest financial results that Sony president Hiroki Totoki responded to a question about the company's lackluster profits. According to him, PlyStation does not generate enough profits and this is the reason why Sony games will be released on more platforms.
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In the past, we wanted to popularize consoles, and the main goal of a first party title was to make the console popular.
That's true, but there is synergy, so if you have strong frst party content – not just on our console but also on other platforms, like PC – a [jeu] first party can be developed on multiple platforms, and this can help improve operating profit, so this is another point we want to work on proactively.
Personally, I think there is room for improvement on the margin, and so I would like to be aggressive in improving our margin performance.
PlayStation's margin is therefore considered too low for the president of Sony and the release of its games on “other platforms” is a direct allusion to the PC. We do not yet know whether Sony will eventually release its games on consoles such as Xbox or Nintendo, as is already the case with Microsoft today.
Regarding hardware, Hiroki Totoki indicated that “cost reduction in this console cycle is really difficult to achieve” due to the increase in component prices. Despite big promotions at the moment on PS5s, it seems that the price of PlayStation consoles should not suffer a significant drop in the medium term.
PlayStation and Xbox, same fight?
In reality, Sony's strategy has already been underway for a while since Sony has already released several of its flagship licenses on PC. God of War was released in 2022 on Steam and we already know that Until Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition are planned for this year.
Very recently, it was the simultaneous release of Helldivers 2 on PS5 and PC that caused a lot of talk. The game from PlayStation Studios is currently in the top sales on Steam and is among the most popular games on the platform.
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On Microsoft's side, the strategy of releasing its games at the same time on PC and Xbox has already been in place for a long time. For example, it's already been eight years since Microsoft announced Xbox Play Anywhere, a program launched on September 13, 2016 that aims to purchase a single version of an Xbox Game Studios game so that it works on both the Xbox console and PC. Microsoft has invested a lot in its ecosystem since the Xbox One era and upcoming announcements should show us that the brand will go even further.