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.
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.
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.
I would have purchased and played Sony games on Steam, if they did not require a Playstation account.
I’m going to cry if I don’t get to play Wolverine, or the upcoming X-Men game after that. Still won’t buy a console, though.
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”.
I understand porting costs money but they kept selling old games for new game prices.
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, 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.
They will continue to release multiplayer games on pc so it will be the “best of both worlds” for sony
We’ll see this again when Marvel Tokon comes out.
Yeah, if they already made me wait past GOTY podcast spoiler season, I’m far less willing to pay full price for it anymore.
This is why Xbox dying is a bad thing.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
They would make so much money if they ported Bloodborne.
Which they can’t do without pissing off FromSoft, and they don’t want to upset FromSoft any more than they already have.
I thought it was Sony that was the issue behind the PC release? All the other fromsoftware games are on pc
Most recent word was Miyazaki is interested in a remake but wants From to do it themselves. From is always busy enough with new stuff that they don’t have the bandwidth to take it. Sony respects this and so it sits.
Bluepoint pitched a Bloodborne remake, but FromSoftware turned it down, not Sony
Now, a new report by Bloomberg claims that Bluepoint did, in fact, approach FromSoft in early 2025, pitching a remake of the 2015 game. It’s said that “the studio was told that the numbers made sense, but FromSoftware didn’t want it to happen”.
Interestingly, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Shuhei Yoshida posited the same this time last year, saying: "Bloodborne is one of the most popular asks on my Twitter/X. And the people wonder why we haven’t really done anything… it should be easy, right?
“Miyazaki-san really, really loved Bloodborne, what he created. So I think he is interested but he’s so successful and he’s so busy, so he cannot do it himself, and he doesn’t want anyone else to touch it.”
I don’t know the exact contract between these two companies, but often times a publisher like Sony will own the title/world/story and the developer will own the code. Sony is within their legal rights to make a remake of Demon’s Souls (also a Sony exclusive from back in the day), but it seems to have upset FromSoft, and when FromSoft is putting out bangers like Elden Ring, you don’t want them to find a reason to not put their games on your console. Other than Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, every other modern FromSoft game has a different publisher, whether it’s Bandai-Namco or Activision.
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 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.
