Following the Q3 2023 earnings release where Sony announced the latest PlayStation 5 sales figures, the earnings call provided interesting tidbits from Sony executives.
As you might recall, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan is set to retire next month. When that news was delivered, we also learned Sony would place Chief Operating Officer (COO) Hiroki Totoki as Chairman of SIE to help with the transition; starting next month, he'll become interim CEO while the company seeks a new Chief Executive Officer.
Totoki spoke about his first experience as SIE Chairman today during the call, pointing out some of the flaws he noticed. As reported by Bloomberg Japan's Takashi Mochizuki, he said:
It's been four months since I became chairman of SIE. A big problem of SIE that I found is they don't necessarily have a deep understanding of how their work is being translated to growth, generation of sustainable profits, and higher margins for the unit as a whole.
Totoki-san appears to have something specific in mind to improve margins (via Twitter user Genki): a more aggressive multiplatform plan to bring PlayStation first-party content to PC.
In the past, we wanted to popularize console, and the 1st party titles' main purpose was to make the PlayStation console popular. It is true, but there is a synergy to it. So if you have strong first-party content, not only with our console but also other platforms like computers, 1st party can be grown with multiplatform and that can help operating profit to improve. So that is another one we want to proactively work on.
I personally think there are opportunities out there for improvement of margins, so I would like to go aggressive in improving our margin performance.
Granted, Sony has already pivoted to bringing pretty much all its first-party PlayStation content to PC. However, it does so with significantly staggered releases: Horizon Forbidden West is launching next month, over two years after the original PS4 and PS5 debut. Just eight months ago, Jim Ryan was adamant this strategy shouldn't change.
Ryan is not in charge anymore, though. As reported in today's quarterly financial release, Sony is aware of the gradual decline in PlayStation 5 hardware sales from the next fiscal year onward as the console enters the latter half of its life. Porting first-party games day and date on PC, or at least much sooner than they've done so far, could be a way to expand the user base and thus the operating profit. After all, the successful launch of Helldivers 2 (a new peak of 203K concurrent users was registered yesterday) proves there's potential there.