More margin, always more margin
If we must remember one thing from Totoki's speech (relayed by IGN), is that PlayStation should generate more margin. As the good financial director that he is, what interests him here is essentially the profitability of his company, and that is why he has a very pragmatic vision of the state in which PlayStation finds itself today, with development costs which increase exponentially unlike revenues. For him, the PlayStation division must improve from a “ business » :
“ I visit the studios and everyone is working very hard to take responsibility and try to optimize the business, and I understand that. But overall growth, profitability, margin increase: how will that translate into those goals? I don't think people understand that deeply. I think that's the company's problem. So for me, I'm trying to understand what's going on in the industry, but also from an analyst perspective, and trying to explain it transparently so people can recognize and notice these problems […] As for the company itself, I think there is room for improvement. And it concerns how to use the money or the development schedule. »
Understand by this that PlayStation does not generate enough margin compared to what this division spends, at least for the financial director (who is obviously looking for the biggest margin possible).
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More cross-platform for PlayStation
What can be done to improve these margins in this case? Hiroki Totoki doesn't give concrete answers, but he has his own opinion on the subject. According to him, PlayStation must increase its multiplatform policy. A strategy which is reminiscent of that towards which Xbox seems to be heading, even if in the case of PlayStation, it is mainly the PC sector which is targeted, as well as that of mobile :
“ If you have strong enough first-party content, and not just on your console but also on other platforms such as desktop, this can help improve profits. So that's another topic that we want to work on proactively. Personally, I believe there are opportunities for margin improvement, which is why I would like to be aggressive in improving our margin performance. »
Which is in line with the vision of Jim Ryan who recently wanted to push to release more PlayStation games on PC, without these ports being released at the same time as the PS5 versions of the games. We can still conclude that the cost of modern AAAs makes the development of exclusives more and more complex, both at Sony and Microsoft.