Sony Group Corp no longer plans to release its big PlayStation 5 games on PC, a major shift in strategy that sees the video-game maker returning to console exclusivity after six years of flirting with multi-platform releases, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
Online games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokon will still be released across multiple platforms, but single-player titles such as last year’s samurai hit Ghost of Yotei and the upcoming action game Saros will remain exclusive to PlayStation 5, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorised to talk publicly about the company’s strategy.
The people cautioned that things could change in the future due to the unpredictable nature of the video-game industry and that Sony’s plans are constantly shifting. But in recent weeks PlayStation scrapped plans to bring Ghost of Yotei and other internally developed games to PC. Two games made by external developers but published by PlayStation, Death Stranding 2 and the upcoming Kena: Scars of Kosmora, are still planned for release on PC this year.
A spokesperson for PlayStation declined to comment.
There are likely a few reasons behind this shift. One is that several recent PlayStation games have not sold well on PC. A faction within PlayStation has also expressed concern that releasing their games on PC risks damaging the console’s brand and will hurt sales of the PlayStation 5 and its successors, according to the people familiar with Sony’s inner workings.
For decades, Sony’s tactic for selling PlayStations was to keep tentpole franchises exclusive to its own consoles. In 2020, it pivoted and began bringing games to personal computers via Steam. Since then, the company has put most of its biggest franchises on PC, such as God of War and The Last of Us.
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.
Now, Sony is looking to take a more straightforward approach: going back to console exclusives.
Sony’s two rivals in the console space have taken different paths. Nintendo Co has released almost all of its games solely on its own Switch hardware, while Microsoft Corp has turned into a multi-platform publisher, releasing everything on PC and many games on PlayStation.
Another factor behind Sony’s pivot may be Microsoft’s next Xbox, which is rumoured to use Windows and be capable of playing PC games. Some executives at PlayStation may not be thrilled at the prospect of one of the company’s flagship games like God of War running on the next Xbox console. – Bloomberg
