Over the last few weeks, several insiders have discussed hearing things about Sony pulling a 180 on its PC publishing plans. Now, Jason Schreier himself has written a full report on Bloomberg stating it outright.
Schreier mentioned hearing things a few weeks back about Sony changing its strategy, but now has now put digital pen to page and written a full report.
According to him, several people who did not want to be named came forward and stated that Sony no longer intends on publishing its big singleplayer exclusives on PC.
“single-player titles such as last year’s samurai hit Ghost of Yotei and the upcoming action game Saros will remain exclusive to PlayStation 5,” said Schreier.
Online and live-service games will still be put on PC where they can benefit from having as many players as possible. Any games made by third-parties but published by Sony will still be able to launch on PC at the discretion of the third party. As Schreier notes, “Death Stranding 2 and the upcoming Kena: Scars of Kosmora, are still planned for release on PC this year.”
It seems like the decision was only made quite recently, as Schreier writes, “…in recent weeks PlayStation scrapped plans to bring Ghost of Yotei and other internally developed games to PC.”
As for why the decision was made to switch back to mostly console exclusivity, Schreier isn’t completely sure. However, he does say this contacts told him that there’s a faction with PlayStation who believe releasing games on PC risks hurting the PlayStation brand and sales of the console.
This, I think, does make sense when you conside that PC PlayStation games have dropped significantly in sales. Some, of course, have been huge hits such as Helldivers 2 (12.7 million copies) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (4.5m copies), but others have not sold well at all. God of War: Ragnarock is at just 300k copies according to analysts, while Horizon Forbidden West only reportedly managed 500k.
In other words, the risk of damaging the PlayStation image was probably worth it when they could consistently sell millions of copies, but waning interest means the small amount of money they are generating may no longer be worth the effort.
Sony has also been very inconsistent with their PC strategy. PC gamers were never sure how long it would take for a game to make the jump – sometimes it was months, sometimes it was years. And on top of that, Sony angered them a little by making PSN accounts mandatory even for singleplayer titles.
Or, as Schreier wryly notes, maybe Sony doesn’t like that the next Xbox is seemingly going to be a glorified PC that can run Steam, meaning you could play God of War on an Xbox.
