Now Sony is talking about PS5 exclusives going multiplatform

Sony is broadening its horizons (Picture: Sony)

The interim boss at PlayStation has said he wants to be ‘aggressive’ in improving the company’s margins, by making PS5 games multiplatform.

As rumours circulate around a potential multiplatform future for Xbox, it seems Sony is considering a similar strategy.

During a Q&A for Sony’s Q3 2023 earnings call, Sony president Hiroki Totoki, who is the current chairman of the gaming division, after Jim Ryan announced his retirement, spoke about how he was seeking to boost profits by putting more first party games on other platforms.

‘In the past, we wanted to popularise console and the first party titles’ main purpose was to make the console popular,’ Totoki said. ‘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 [PC]. First party can be grown with the multiplatforms 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.’

While it’s unclear whether this could extend to platforms like Xbox and Switch, Sony already has a successful track record of releasing PC versions of PlayStation titles – including The Last Of Us, Death Stranding and the upcoming port of Horizon Forbidden West.

What this could mean, however, is more simultaneous launches across PlayStation and PC. Just recently Helldivers 2, which is published by Sony, exceeded expectations through this exact release strategy, with around million copies sold in less than a week, according to developer Arrowhead.

This strategy might also be an attempt to offset the lack of first party exclusives on the horizon, with Totoki stating he has no plans to release any new titles from any major existing PlayStation franchises over the next year.

It also might mean exclusives on the near horizon, like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Stellar Blade and Rise of the Rōnin, will end up on PC eventually. Final Fantasy 7 Remake, for example, launched on PC in 2021 a year after it released on PlayStation 4.

While Sony might be in a different position to Microsoft with Xbox, it increasingly looks like we’re steering towards a more accessible, multi-platform future across the board.

The obvious danger for Sony is that while they’ll make more money selling their first party games on other formats that reduces the incentive to buy a PlayStation console – which is the whole reason format exclusives exist in the first place.

At the moment, the PlayStation easily outsells the Xbox but every new generation resets the table and even if persistent digital ecosystems help to anchor customers in place, the erosion of format exclusives makes the whole business inherently more unstable for console manufacturers.

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