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Sony has reportedly reaffirmed its pullback from PC, telling staff its narrative single-player games will remain PlayStation 5 exclusive. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier said PlayStation studio business boss Hermen Hulst told staff on Monday, locking in the likes of Saros, Ghost of Yotei, and the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet to PlayStation. While multiplayer games will continue to launch on PC as well as PlayStation, it’s a significant change of strategy from Sony, and deprives PC gamers of the company’s tentpole releases.
PC gamers have been reacting to the news with a mix of disappointment and lack of surprise. While some had hoped to play these narrative games on their platform of choice, others have said they’re not missing out on much. Others still, have said they continue to see no reason to buy a PS5 just to play these games — especially given Sony just raised the price of its console hardware.
“I skipped buying a PS5 and I don’t feel like I’ve missed out,” said one PC gamer on the PC gaming subreddit. “Yeah, back when Spider-Man came out, I was REALLY excited for it and was considering buying a PlayStation just to play it, but I held back,” another added. “When it finally came out on PC, it was good, but not as great as I built up in my head. Any game that comes out as PS exclusive, I’ll just remind myself of Spider-Man.”
“Why would a PC gamer buy a 600 dollar PS5 for a few games?” questioned another. “Do you know what happens instead? The PC gamer simply ignores Sony games and plays other PC games. Sony forgets if people are willing to wait YEARS for a port and then LONGER for a discount that sure as s**t isn’t the crowd that runs out to buy a console and games that keep going up in price.”
“As much as I love the Horizon series I just won’t be playing part three I guess,” another said. “There’s no way I’d buy a console for the few games I’d be interested in.”
“PS5 has been out for ages and still has no games, and he wants to double down,” another said in a comment that sums up much of the sentiment within the PC gaming community.
“Please tell Hermen Hulst that my wallet is exclusive to PC games (preferably Steam) and I don’t want to buy a PS console to play Sony games anymore,” said another. “That worked before, when there was quality, genre variety and overall quantity. Now it’s not worth it anymore.”
“This isn’t going to magically make me buy a Playstation. It’s just going to make me not buy your games,” another said.
You get the idea. It’s important to note that Sony has yet to issue a consumer-facing comment on all this (it’s not commented publicly at all), so we don’t know the rationale. Still, others have offered their take. In March, when Bloomberg first reported the news, it suggested poor recent sales of PlayStation games on PC and the risk to the PlayStation brand, as well as a potential impact on PS5 and maybe even PS6 sales, were to blame for the policy shift. Bloomberg also suggested the prospect of PlayStation games running on the next Xbox, which will run PC games, may have also encouraged Sony’s return to console exclusives.
Meanwhile, Peter Dalton, Head of Technology at Bluepoint Games, took to social media to say a “more interesting possibility” is that Sony is responding to the rise of a Steam-based console ecosystem, aka the recently announced and subsequently delayed Steam Machine.
Sony has in recent years expanded PlayStation to PC, but refrained from going as far as Microsoft, which releases all its games on PC at the same time as console. Sony, however, has employed a staggered approach, releasing its single-player PlayStation games on PC after a period of console exclusivity. When it comes to live service games like Helldivers 2 it’s a different story, with Sony publishing on PC day-one — and in the case of Arrowhead’s third-person action game, to record-breaking success. Sony-owned Bungie launched live service extraction shooter Marathon across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S at the same time earlier this year. Guerrilla’s live-service multiplayer Horizon spinoff, Hunters Gathering, is due out on PC and PS5. Fairgames, from Haven Studios, is down for PC and PS5 also.
Sony’s decision to return to PlayStation exclusivity comes at an interesting time. Microsoft is said to be considering some sort of exclusivity policy change as it works to win over the hearts and minds of hardcore Xbox fans. Indeed, exclusive games is the top request on a recently launched official Xbox feedback platform. The question is, can Sony and Microsoft get away with leaving multiplatform money on the table?
In April, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida suggested that Sony would struggle to recoup the huge budgets invested in its first-party games without porting them to PC.
“In PS4 days still we are making AAA games with big budget,” Yoshida said. “I somehow felt the bigger the budget, the safer in some strange way. Creating bigger, better-looking games that people are asking for. In the past it kind of worked, you know, business wise. But in the last five or so years, publishers and developers must have realized that model may not be sustainable.
“Releasing games on PC after a couple of years must have helped recoup the investment of these big budget games and help[ed] the team and company to reinvest that money into their new games,” he added, “So, from a business standpoint, I think it made sense for me.
“If they were releasing new AAA games day one on other platforms, I don’t think that’s a good strategy for [a] platform holder like PlayStation. I’m not seeing any proof of them changing their strategy this generation, but if they are changing it’s going to be interesting how they are able to maintain the investment on the big budget games on the first-party side going forward.”
It’s worth noting that getting into PlayStation console gaming has become more expensive this year. After price rises in March, a new PS5 now starts at $600, and a PS5 Pro now costs $900. And just this week, Sony announced PlayStation Plus price rises, blaming “ongoing market conditions.”
Reacting to the PlayStation exclusivity news, Mat Piscatella, Senior Director and Video Game Industry Advisor at Circana, expressed concern about the viability of Sony’s decision.
“I hope — well, for everyone’s sake, really — that ‘ongoing global market conditions’ drastically improve rather quickly or I expect this decision will be reversed sooner rather than later,” he said.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
