The full article that was hinted at in interviews last week.
There are likely a few reasons behind this shift. One is that several recent PlayStation games have not sold well on PC.
Interesting…
But the strategy has been muddled and confused many players. Most PC releases arrived months or years after the games came to PlayStation. The cadence was never consistent, and the announcements appeared to be haphazard. The company also upset PC players by asking them to create PlayStation Network accounts to access many of the games.
I love Horizon: Zero Dawn. I have not played Horizon: Forbidden West. By the time it came to PC, Sony started making PSN logins necessary to even authenticate the game in the first place, which is basically just the worst kind of DRM. They’ve reverted this policy, but now I don’t trust them. They put out a handful of games on GOG where I don’t have to trust them, and I’ll probably still pick a few of those up one day, but Forbidden West isn’t there. Seems to me that they have no idea how badly they screwed up this rollout themselves. Oh, Uncharted 4 didn’t do too well on PC? Where are the PC versions of Uncharted 1-3? Where can I play the original God of War trilogy? I’m not buying a PlayStation no matter how many exclusives you lock up there, so I’ll just continue to not play your handful of exclusives.
Anyway, that’s my two cents.
This just in, Sony announces they HATE money!
I understand porting costs money but they kept selling old games for new game prices.
Yeah, Sony is baffled why the people willing to wait over 2 years for the game to come to PC are choosing to wait some more to get it cheaper instead of buying it at full price.
Then scratch their heads when Helldivers 2 releases at the same time as the PS5 and PC outsells the PS5
Helldivers 2 has sold 12 million copies on Steam alone, while PlayStation 5 sales are estimated at 5 million units.
https://tech4gamers.com/helldivers-2-sold-more-on-pc-than-ps5/
And Sony’s response is to continue to delay for years before releasing to PC expecting PC gamers to have the same enthusiasm for a release years later as they would a day 1 launch.
We’ll see this again when Marvel Tokon comes out.
They will continue to release multiplayer games on pc so it will be the “best of both worlds” for sony
And at least some of their flagship games were ported to PC by a developer that didn’t bother with optimization, leading to ridiculously high system requirements, so only a fraction of PC gamers would reasonably be able play them. (I’m looking at you, The Last of Us.)
High prices, late releases, badly performing ports, forced online accounts… Each of these mistakes is a slap in a potential customer’s face. Together, they practically guarantee poor sales.
Maybe they think recent RAM and GPU prices will lead many PC gamers to start buying Playstations? I doubt it.
Yeah, if they already made me wait past GOTY podcast spoiler season, I’m far less willing to pay full price for it anymore.
It was too little, too late, too expensive. Logically it would sell less than expected after a lame attempt.
Gamers are being shown more then ever their buying older games not newest ones. Part of this is the eshitification of the industry.
The problem is the ports a lot of the time are awful.
Partly because newly released games are buggy and unfinished and they can take a while before they’re stable and quality of life features fully in place.
I don’t want to pay to be a beta tester, and I especially don’t want to pay full price for that. I can wait a bit and get a better game for cheaper.
I’ve only bought a couple of games on early release or at release lately. Deep Rock Galactic Survivor because it had a demo I enjoyed, and Hades 2 because I trust that studio and Hades is one of my favourite games.
This is why Xbox dying is a bad thing.
Exactly. This is Sony declaring victory in the console wars. You could argue “But Nintendo”, but Nintendo was never playing the same game as Sony & Microsoft. You want to play Nintendo games, you buy a Nintendo. You want to play Sony games, Sony says you have to buy a Sony PlayStation.
I’m not a fan, but it could work.
I’ll never buy a PlayStation. So I will just not play their games or will play them if they come to PC. That’s it.
Leadership is out of touch with the market/reality.
First, hardware costs are going way up. People will be less likely to buy multiple hardware platforms to play your exclusive games.
Second, I’m not buying a PS4 or 5 or 6 just to play Bloodborne. Literally the only reason I care about this.
But that’s okay, there’s plenty of other things to play and it’s only getting better behind an emulator so you may lose a purchase there.
Corporate suits love ignoring player feedback and telling people they’re wrong.
No, we’re goddamn sick of enshittification and would rather PlayStation failed than give into it.
Sony’s PC pivot reversal is a bold bet. They’ve spent years building PC goodwill—abandoning it suggests they’re seeing data we don’t.
From one of the other articles about this I read, they are seeing the same data but interpreting dumbly. They aren’t seeing the kind of explosive sales they want during the period the games are locked to the Playstation and it doesn’t pick up after they release it to other platforms because the hype train has halted by then.
Why they think just dropping other platforms will help more than simultaneously releasing them everywhere is pretty silly when that is their reasoning.
When almost half of their income comes from MTX and other services purchases, their first-party games were never, ever going to be simultaneous releases. Sony wants as many users platformed in their ecosystem as possible, and exclusivity is one of the ways you do that. This was a pretty simple ROI calculation, and when you’re already losing Steam’s cut, it would take solid performance to be worthwhile.
The above comment mentions goodwill, and that’s another thing; Sony burnt up the goodwill they earned with PC users (and probably then some) with the PSN nonsense for these ports. It’s like how Nvidia continually gets bad press for their gaming GPU division, at some point you gotta look at how it’s affecting your overall brand.
Uncharted 4 didn’t do too well on PC? Where are the PC versions of Uncharted 1-3
Release of 4 could have pushed a bunch of sales on a 1-3 PC collection as well! Release them at the same time, put the 1-3 collection on a discount and charge full price for 4. People will gobble up both. (I would put 4 on my wish list and buy the 1-3 collection in that situation, but that is still me giving them money for a two-decade-old game.)
I’d do the same…
I bought 4 cause its called legacy of thieves collection, so I thought it was going to be you know a collection of the whole series. Instead its just 4 and some DLC.
I still don’t know why they sell one Uncharted game on Steam under the name “Uncharted Collection”. It’s just one game and some DLC.
Are you serious?! How is that ok?
I was conned by this.
As a PC player my rule of thumb is there has to be at least 10 great games on a console before I buy a console. I owned a PS4 because it crossed the threshold before they started releasing the games on PC.
Just one or two games on my wishlist for the PS5, at this rate I’ll never buy one.
My guess is maybe they saw reduced console sales for folks like me?
I also had the 10 exclusive too for consoles, which is why I got the PS3 and PS4 Pro. PS5 doesn’t meet it because they blew it on their live service attempts and it is crazy Naughty Dog has released nothing new that isn’t a remake this gen.
I don’t think I’ll get another Sony console again even if they never port to PC except for jailbroken ones going forward.
That’s probably where I am too.
And with news on Xbox being AI trash possibly… Consoles may be dead.
Damn, I was really looking forward to Ghost of Yotei after falling in love with Ghost of Tsushima. I bet Sony is betting they can snag guys like me into a console purchase for whatever the favorite franchise sequel release is. Idk if that’s a Japanese cultural misunderstanding or just plain stupidity, but they’re gonna be disappointed.
Ah, the Sony flip flop on exclusivity continues.
They won’t sell more consoles because of this decision and they won’t get the PC money either. As for me, I’m fine with it. Better developers and published have fallen so far and yet we still have great games to play.
I think they’re finally worried about Valve and Steam.
In what way?
Every game they release on Steam is adding value to Valve’s hardware. It’s fundamentally not that different to Sony releasing games on the Xbox or Switch.
Potentially good for software sales, but a death sentence for future hardware sales that rely on exclusivity to justify the platform’s existence.
That Steam is actually a competitor to Playstation. Even more so with the Steam Deck and future Steam Machine in living room. It’s no longer this “oh it’s PC, a different audience”.
Putting games on PC works for third party publishers because it works perfectly with their business model. It works for Microsoft because they whole sale lost the console market and are slowly slinking their way out. Sony is still a huge contender in the console space and has no plans to cede any share. While it’s great for the consumer to have PC releases it hurts the console business. Regardless if you have a small sect of people who would never buy a console to begin with. For me I own a ps5 as well as a PC. I am more likely to buy the game on PC. Sony from there loses out on the maximum cut they could get from the game. They lose out on me needed to have ps plus to play online. Not to mention if the ps6 does cost close to the same as a PC having games on both leaves little incentive to buy the console.
I am not to mad about it, I rarely play my PS5 now I’ll have more incentive to buy the games knowing I won’t get a PC release.
During the PS2 era, there were lots of reasons that a game might end up exclusive to one platform even if there was no deal involved. Now the only exclusives are the ones Sony makes themselves, so there’s maybe one or two of those per year, and that doesn’t guarantee that those one or two are going to be your cup of tea, let alone justify buying a dedicated machine for $500 just to play those few games. As opposed to a PC that plays every video game that isn’t made by Sony or Nintendo. It gets harder and harder for that $500 to make sense, and the PC ports Sony had been doing was any attempt at all to recoup the money that they spent on blockbuster games that weren’t growing their console install base.
I called those “soft exclusives” and I argue it killed Sony in the 7th console generation. Metal Gear , Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry, Ridge Racer were all exclusive because the publisher made enough money on one console. Then the Xbox had its small time to shine. And boy did Sony regret it…
(GTA and MGS eventually had releases but much later on)
The 7th gen was exactly where this started to break down, in large part because these machines are all so, so similar these days, rather than having a completely different set of capabilities. I think consoles as we knew them years ago are just reaching the point where they’ve outlived their usefulness. Sony can try to fight it by holding onto exclusives, but I think it’s actually only going to hurt them.
It’s a catch22. After that generation things became a lot easier to develop for across the board. At the same time I believe became easier to develop the console. Rather than build chipsets entirely in house you just contract a chip manufacturer. And shockingly when your competitor uses the same company things get samey.
I don’t know if this was ever avoidable. The capabilities of modern day processors would be hard to fathom console companies building their own unique variants on. I’d argue if they did consoles would cost even more now than they already do.
It’s interesting to think what could have been. Definitely would have made console reveals more interesting. And even ports more interesting. But I can’t sure for sure better …
