Sony’s surprise decision to reverse its strategy of porting singleplayer PlayStation games to PC has been scrutinized plenty. Bluepoint Games’ head of technology suggested it was likely because Sony’s more worried about Valve than about Xbox, while our own Morgan Park pointed out that Sony is only robbing us of maybe four half-decent games.
Alinea Insights has been analyzing sales of PlayStation games more generally, but with some interesting info about the PC side of things for us to dig out. Like the fact a full 42% of Death Stranding 2’s PC sales came from China, which was its “biggest Steam market”. Alinea notes that “China is a top market for Stellar Blade on Steam as well.”
According to Steam’s last hardware survey, 39.48% of Steam users have their language set to English and 21.85% to Simplified Chinese, making it the second-most popular language by a large margin—every other language is a single-digit percentage or less. It’s difficult to figure out how many actual people that comes to though, since a bunch of those accounts will inevitably belong to internet cafes. Some estimates put the number over 30 million. Whatever the actual figure, it’s a sizable chunk of players to up and ignore because you want people to fork out for a PS5 to play Wolverine.
Shift Up, the developer of Stellar Blade, won’t be publishing its sequel with Sony. In an earnings Q&A, the studio said, “we are formulating an optimal go-to-market strategy designed to maximize sales and reach a broad global audience from day one.” For “broad global audience” we can probably substitute “Chinese audience”.
Alinea also noted that releasing games on PC didn’t seem to hurt sales on PlayStation. In fact, it had the opposite effect, with Death Stranding 2 having “its best two-week stretch since launch on Sony’s platform” after coming to PC. And while it was on sale at the time, the same discount had run twice before with less effective results. Stellar Blade, which wasn’t discounted on PlayStation when it was ported to PC, also enjoyed a simultaneous boost in PS5 sales.
Launching on PC gives a bump to how many people will stream a game and just talk about it on the internet in general, and word of mouth remains a good way to sell anything. No matter what language it’s in.
