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.
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.
Partly because newly released games are buggy and unfinished and they can take a while before they’re stable and quality of life features fully in place.
I don’t want to pay to be a beta tester, and I especially don’t want to pay full price for that. I can wait a bit and get a better game for cheaper.
I’ve only bought a couple of games on early release or at release lately. Deep Rock Galactic Survivor because it had a demo I enjoyed, and Hades 2 because I trust that studio and Hades is one of my favourite games.
This just in, Sony announces they HATE money!
I understand porting costs money but they kept selling old games for new game prices.
Yeah, if they already made me wait past GOTY podcast spoiler season, I’m far less willing to pay full price for it anymore.
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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.
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’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.
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.
These all sound like reasons for Sony to get out of the console market. (And maybe start making PCs that go head to head with Steam Machines.)
You want some reasons why they shouldn’t? The PS5 is wildly successful. Moving to PC means they need to migrate the PS store to PC with all their players and their libraries as well, probably renegotiating on publishing rights for every game on PS, spending all that money, and then ultimately end up with fewer customers, 70% on Sony titles and nothing from third parties sold to people playing on Steam.
Or they can just keep doing what they’re doing and get 100% on Sony titles, 30% on everything else, and remain the dominant gaming destination for most households.
Putting games on PC works for third party publishers because it works perfectly with their business model. It works for Microsoft because they whole sale lost the console market and are slowly slinking their way out. Sony is still a huge contender in the console space and has no plans to cede any share. While it’s great for the consumer to have PC releases it hurts the console business. Regardless if you have a small sect of people who would never buy a console to begin with. For me I own a ps5 as well as a PC. I am more likely to buy the game on PC. Sony from there loses out on the maximum cut they could get from the game. They lose out on me needed to have ps plus to play online. Not to mention if the ps6 does cost close to the same as a PC having games on both leaves little incentive to buy the console.
I am not to mad about it, I rarely play my PS5 now I’ll have more incentive to buy the games knowing I won’t get a PC release.
During the PS2 era, there were lots of reasons that a game might end up exclusive to one platform even if there was no deal involved. Now the only exclusives are the ones Sony makes themselves, so there’s maybe one or two of those per year, and that doesn’t guarantee that those one or two are going to be your cup of tea, let alone justify buying a dedicated machine for $500 just to play those few games. As opposed to a PC that plays every video game that isn’t made by Sony or Nintendo. It gets harder and harder for that $500 to make sense, and the PC ports Sony had been doing was any attempt at all to recoup the money that they spent on blockbuster games that weren’t growing their console install base.
I called those “soft exclusives” and I argue it killed Sony in the 7th console generation. Metal Gear , Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry, Ridge Racer were all exclusive because the publisher made enough money on one console. Then the Xbox had its small time to shine. And boy did Sony regret it…
(GTA and MGS eventually had releases but much later on)
The 7th gen was exactly where this started to break down, in large part because these machines are all so, so similar these days, rather than having a completely different set of capabilities. I think consoles as we knew them years ago are just reaching the point where they’ve outlived their usefulness. Sony can try to fight it by holding onto exclusives, but I think it’s actually only going to hurt them.
It’s a catch22. After that generation things became a lot easier to develop for across the board. At the same time I believe became easier to develop the console. Rather than build chipsets entirely in house you just contract a chip manufacturer. And shockingly when your competitor uses the same company things get samey.
I don’t know if this was ever avoidable. The capabilities of modern day processors would be hard to fathom console companies building their own unique variants on. I’d argue if they did consoles would cost even more now than they already do.
It’s interesting to think what could have been. Definitely would have made console reveals more interesting. And even ports more interesting. But I can’t sure for sure better …
Forbidden West doesn’t require a PSN account as far as I’m aware. At least I didn’t have to create one.
There was a time where it did. A few other games did too. They changed the stick into a carrot, and now a PSN account just unlocks a few extras. But like I said, that hurt my trust as a consumer.
A bit sad for me that I won’t be playing the next Horizon game. Oh well. Enough other games to play. Maybe I’ll buy the latest god of war game if the price comes down enough. I’m patient.
You do not need to feel bad. The next Horizon game is a live service grift.
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From one of the other articles about this I read, they are seeing the same data but interpreting dumbly. They aren’t seeing the kind of explosive sales they want during the period the games are locked to the Playstation and it doesn’t pick up after they release it to other platforms because the hype train has halted by then.
Why they think just dropping other platforms will help more than simultaneously releasing them everywhere is pretty silly when that is their reasoning.
When almost half of their income comes from MTX and other services purchases, their first-party games were never, ever going to be simultaneous releases. Sony wants as many users platformed in their ecosystem as possible, and exclusivity is one of the ways you do that. This was a pretty simple ROI calculation, and when you’re already losing Steam’s cut, it would take solid performance to be worthwhile.
The above comment mentions goodwill, and that’s another thing; Sony burnt up the goodwill they earned with PC users (and probably then some) with the PSN nonsense for these ports. It’s like how Nvidia continually gets bad press for their gaming GPU division, at some point you gotta look at how it’s affecting your overall brand.
This is why Xbox dying is a bad thing.
