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.
I think this is more about user retention than additional sales. In a world where PC players stay on PC and console players stay on console, porting games to PC makes sense. However, with Steam OS making things easy and Microsoft’s plans for making the next Xbox a consoled-PC, there’s a much higher risk of PS players migrating to PC -particularly if their favorite exclusives are landing there anyway. And of course there’s no indication that PC players will ever invest in a console unless there are exclusives.
Furthermore, with rising costs of computer parts, Sony might have to subsidize their hardware a little bit more than they’re comfortable with, and that means they need players in their store buying games and not buying games from Steam.
And finally, it’s worth mentioning that Sony fumbled bad with first party games this gen, meaning the PS5’s success has been carried solely on the backs of 3rd parties. If PS players were to buy a Steam Machine, they would have almost no reason to ever buy a PS again unless Sony starts giving them a reason to.
So as much as it disgruntles all of us to not be able to buy all our games exactly where we want, it’s probably a smarter investment for Sony as a video game company to not be porting their games to PC.