Hiroki Totoki wants Sony to be aggressive when it comes to improving its gaming division's profit margins, which he says can partly be achieved with a greater focus on bringing first-party games to PC. During a Q&A session following a financial results presentation, Totoki was asked if there were any initiatives planned to improve the bottom line, or if the game division was seeing an increase in gross income but not profits. Hardware and first-party games were the two main factors that he wanted to focus on. He implied that console prices wouldn't be dropping while it looked for ways to improve margins because of the increased price of components. He asked, "How can we, given the situation, put our product lines together to make it affordable, without relying on steep discounts, to reasonably sell them?" I think that is important, and there is an opportunity in that.
He made it clear that multi-platform is the way forward for first-party games, and that PC is still the way forward. He said that the main purpose of a first-party title was to make the console popular. If you have strong first-party content on our console, as well as computers, that can be grown with multi- platform, and that can help operating profit to improve. I think there are opportunities for improvement of margin, so I would like to improve our margin performance.
Helldivers 2 was released for PS5 and PC on the same day. The result was the highest concurrent player record yet, with more users playing Helldivers 2 at the same time on PC than was previously achieved by ports of more high-profile Sony games. In 2022, Hermen Hulst, head of Sony's PS Studios, said he thought future consoles would have to wait at least a year before coming to PC. While he did not say that Sony has plans for more day-and-date PC releases of PS5 titles, his comments suggest a change of policy is being planned. In order to take a more hands-on approach with the company's games division, Totoki will be the interim CEO of SIE from April 1, when Jim Ryan will retire.