The president and chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment has revealed during a Q&A session following the company’s latest earnings call that he’s looking to improve the company’s profit margins with an ‘aggressive’ strategy that involves bringing more of its first-party titles to PC.
When asked why Sony’s gaming division was witnessing a boost in gross income but not profits, and if there were any plans to improve the situation, Hiroki Totoki — who will serve as interim CEO of SIE from April 1, 2024 — revealed two main areas to focus on: hardware and first-party software.
How can we, given the situation, put our product lines together to make it affordable, without relying on steep discounts, to reasonably sell them to continue our commercial journey on a sustainable basis?” he asked. “I personally think that’s important, and there is an opportunity in that.
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In the past, we wanted to popularise consoles, and a first-party title’s main purpose was to make the console popular.
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.
Sony announced a slew of key details during its latest earnings call, chief among which includes news that PS5 has now shipped 54.8 million units worldwide. The format holder also confirmed it won’t be releasing any major franchise instalments before March 31, 2025, so it’ll be a bit quieter in terms of big releases for this year.
Beyond that, the hardware manufacturer has lowered its sales forecast for its flagship console for the current financial year, and now expects to move 21 million PS5s instead of 25 million.
[Source – VGC]