Recent years have seen Sony expanding its presence in the PC gaming space significantly, with the likes of God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Marvel’s Spider-Man having seen impressive success on the platform. Much more recently, Arrowhead Game Studios-developed co-op third-person shooter Helldivers 2 launched simultaneously on PS5 and PC, and has attracted a sizeable playerbase on the latter, even becoming Sony’s biggest launch on the platform to date.
And it seems the company has every intention to not only keep heading in that direction, but even accelerate its plans. During a recent Q&A session as part of its quarterly earnings briefing, Sony president and PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki spoke about the same. Noting the success the company’s first-party releases have enjoyed to date, he said that there’s still plenty of room left for maximizing profits further, and one of the ways for Sony to do that is by being more “proactive” and “aggressive” with its multiplatform releases on PC.
“In the past, we wanted to popularize consoles, and a first-party title’s main purpose was to make the console popular,” Totoki said (via VGC). “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 proactively work on.
“I personally think there are opportunities out there for improvement of margin, so I would like to go aggressive on improving our margin performance.”
The aforementioned Helldivers 2 is a rare example of a PlayStation Studios title seeing a simultaneous launch on PC and PS5, with the vast majority of the company’s games – especially the major flagship ones – having received staggered releases, where they come to PC much later than PlayStation consoles. Whether Totoki’s comments indicate that Sony might be looking into day-and-date PC releases for its games remains to be seen, but given the success the company has enjoyed on the platform already, it would be surprising if that wasn’t at least a conversation within PlayStation’s ranks.
Of course, the company has previously said that it’s willing to do simultaneous multiplatform releases for its live service titles, with the likes of Fairgame$ and Concord both having been officially confirmed for PS5 and PC.
Another upcoming first-party Sony title – Until Dawn’s upcoming remaster, which, of course, isn’t live service – is also going to release on PC day-and-date.
In May of 2022, Sony said that roughly 50% of its first-party portfolio would have a PC presence by FY 2025/26.
