Sony has expressed interest in making more of its PlayStation games multiplatform.
Following the release of the company’s latest quarterly earnings report, Sony president Hiroki Totoki spoke about broadening PlayStation’s release strategy, as shared by The Verge‘s Tom Warren.
“In the past, as you all know, we wanted to popularize console and first-party titles’ main purpose was to make the hardware, the console, popular,” he said. “That is true, but there’s a synergy to it, so if we have strong first-party content — not only with our console but also other platforms like computers — and first-party can be grown with multi-platforms, that could help operating profit to improve. So that’s another one that we want to proactively work on.”
It should be noted that PlayStation has already been bringing many of its PS4 and PS5 games to PC over the past few years, including The Last of Us Part I, God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man and Horizon Forbidden West. However, they generally come to PC at least one or two years later.
Instead, Totoki seems to be alluding to shortening the gap between releases or, perhaps, even doing cross-platform launches. Earlier this month, PlayStation published the Starship Troopers-like multiplayer shooter Helldivers 2 on both PS5 and PC, a rare move from the company. Ultimately, this helped the game become PlayStation’s biggest PC launch with an impressive 150,000 peak players, so that cross-platform launch clearly paid off.
Of course, a multiplayer game is quite different from the single-player games that have been PlayStation’s bread and butter, so it remains to be seen whether the company would experiment with any of those coming to console and PC simultaneously. What seems more likely is the company might bring games to PC closer to when they launch on consoles.
At the same time, the company revealed in its latest earnings report that it missed sales targets for the PS5, indicating waning interest in the console compared to strong demand early in its lifecycle. What’s more, the Insomniac Games hack from last year revealed that Sony is paying as much as $300 million USD to develop games (about $406 million CAD), so releasing games on more than one platform would help recoup those costs.
Totoki’s comments come amid long-running rumours of rival console maker Microsoft planning to adopt a heavy shift to multiplatform Xbox releases. While the company has been launching games on both Xbox consoles and PC for several years now, reports suggesting it will start bringing these titles to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.
Xbox has yet to confirm any of this but says it will shed light on its plans on February 15th.
It remains to be seen exactly what PlayStation and Xbox will do, but both companies definitely seem to be moving even further away from the old “exclusivity” business model.
Via: @tomwarren
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