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Bloomberg's typically well-informed Jason Schreier has reported that new single-player PlayStation games won't be ported to PC, in a major departure from past Sony strategy. The announcement was reportedly made in a recent Sony town hall meeting by PlayStation studios boss Hermen Hulst, and follows on from reports in March that 2025 PlayStation tentpole Ghost of Yotei wouldn't see a PC release - something that now seems confirmed. But is it the right move?
Before we get into that, it's worth clarifying that while narrative games are reportedly now off the cards, multiplayer offerings from Sony studios will still be released on PC. However, that is cold comfort given the quantity and quality of Sony first-party games that made the transition to PC over the past six years, including multiple titles from series like Horizon, The Last of Us, Marvel's Spider-Man and God of War, not to mention single entries from Uncharted, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet and Clank, Days Gone and Returnal. Just these names account for 14 games in total, and form a distinct part of the PC landscape.
As well as being uniformly well-reviewed and popular games, Sony's single-player ports also typically impressed on a technical level, whether that was in terms of ray-traced open worlds like Marvel's Spider-Man and Horizon Forbidden West, or in terms of rapid loading via DirectStorage like Ratchet and Clank. Sure, there were occasional launch let-downs like Horizon Zero Dawn or The Last of Us Part 1, but games from Dutch porting masters Nixxes in particular set a high technical standard for scalability and polish.
It's impossible to view this as good news for PC gamers, but it's worth bearing in mind the state of play for PlayStation too. Rivals Xbox have publicly committed to a hybrid console that sits halfway within the PC space, so turning off the tap for PC ports also hurts Microsoft's next-generation efforts. Even if those games would have arrived a year (or more) later after first launching on PlayStation 6, it's clear that Sony would rather its own studios work on PlayStation exclusives. This is the same model that Nintendo has operated under for years, of course.
Having a strong library of exclusive games also helps to justify the high console prices that manufacturers like Sony are being forced into by the huge AI-fuelled rise in flash memory components like RAM, VRAM and SSDs. Given the popularity of PC gaming and the rise of gaming handhelds alongside laptops and desktops, it gets a lot harder to justify a PS5 Pro or PS6 upgrade if you already have a decent gaming PC. Move those console exclusives back to being true exclusives though, and the proposition looks a little sweeter.
There's also the ongoing trend for ballooning development costs for PC games. While most PlayStation releases have arrived in good condition, sloppier releases have suffered poor initial reviews as a result, no doubt depressing sales to some extent. Actually producing a great PC port and avoiding the usual pitfalls is not the work of a moment. Eliminating stutter, making a great options menu, properly supporting arbitrary resolutions and frame-rates, building on the console release with new graphical technologies and scalable settings; all of these take a lot of development and QA effort, which doesn't come cheap.
|
Game (w/ link to our PC coverage) |
PC Release Year |
Lead Porting Studio |
|
2020 |
Virtuos, Guerrilla Games |
|
|
2021 |
Bend Studio |
|
|
2022 |
Jetpack Interactive |
|
|
2022 |
Nixxes Software |
|
|
2022 |
Nixxes Software |
|
|
2022 |
Iron Galaxy |
|
|
2023 |
Climax Studios |
|
|
2023 |
Iron Galaxy |
|
|
2023 |
Nixxes Software |
|
|
2024 |
Nixxes Software |
|
|
2024 |
Nixxes Software |
|
|
2024 |
Jetpack Interactive |
|
|
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 |
2025 |
Nixxes Software |
|
2025 |
Iron Galaxy |
With all of these confluent factors, perhaps it's a surprise that PlayStation ports to PC lasted as long as they did. And yet, Sony's abandonment of its PC fans still feels cold-hearted to me, not to mention the effect that this will have on specialist porting studios like Iron Galaxy and Nixxes, who will have far fewer big titles to work on going forward.
But what do you make of Sony's decision? Let us know in the poll above and the comments below - we're really interested to hear your thoughts.
Comments 20
I don't really agree with the framing that this is a response to Helix. It makes much more sense to look at the market for how it is (where Sony PC offerings were largely ignored save for Helldivers 2, Destiny and even Marathon to an extent), and also the impact of offering less exclusive titles in the market (that effect being the loss of PlayStation's value as a platform vs other platforms like Nintendo).
@Hustler_One I agree with you in that I think it's a multi-faceted thing, with Helix being one (small but significant) component. Certainly sales figures on PC would play a role too, and the erosion of PlayStation as a distinct brand.
I'm split on this.
On the one hand gatekeeping games away from other fellow gamers isn't great, most will only choose one console, or PC, and i'd rather more players had access to these games and got to experience them.
On the other I still believe exclusives are important to push the industry, and if everything was on everything would half of these games even exist at all?
I think it's the right call for their business, but not one I get excited about.
I think it is a mistake because of the long term loss of revenue, it makes sense for it to be a time delayed release, it might also tie in with cross gen upgrades for the next console version. I have a PS5 Pro and a PC so it does not really matter to me and on a few games I have double dipped because the PC version looked quite a bit better, but I did wait for the PC version to be on sale. I do think long term it will result in a loss of revenue, but it is hard to tell if it is needed for brand preservation.
@wsjudd Dear Will, I want to thank you for your articles here. When this website started, I expected to see something similar to the Eurogamer website with activated DF filter. But this website is so much more! Your articles are increasingly becoming a core part of DF, on a similar level as the videos. Keep on doing this great work!
Considering that many of Sony's PC ports ended up becoming PC benchmarking staples, I think it's a bad idea to give up on it.
I don't have software sales #s but it doesn't seem like PC releases have hurt PS software sales. They put out hardware sales figures that show it definitely isn't hurting PS5 hardware sales.
It would impact me more if their PC release schedule wasn't, "Put the game out multiple years later, with generous enhancements like it works at more than one resolution and it supports a keyboard, like all computer software made since the 1970s, full launch day MSRP when there hasn't been a retail store selling PS5 copies for launch day price in over a year."
I understand them. Consoles have very little to offer besides exclusive games at this point.
A decade ago you could argue that maintaining a gaming PC required some extra efforts, but now it's pretty much effortless - Windows updates are automatically executed when you shut it down, video drivers update with a couple clicks, Steam and GOG Galaxy work pretty much flawlessly. You can play with keyboard and mouse, you can play with every controller out there, you can play on a TV, you can play on a wide range of monitors in every conceivable format. You buy a game on PC and you can even play it on a handheld device. The only argument left in favor of consoles is that PCs are big and you can't just put them under the TV in the living room. And Steam is about to solve that with the Steam Machine. Add to that the rumor that the next Xbox will be a console/PC hybrid of a sort that can play PC games and the scales go completely off balance.
Sony's not making a choice here. They are playing the only card they have left.
DRAM and VRAM are not types of flash memory, granted SSDs (non volatile storage) use DRAM (either on-board dram or reserved from host system memory in 'Dramless' SSDs) Bit concerned that DF allowed such a basic error to get through the editing process.
I am somewhat outraged by the remark that Sony's decision is "cold hearted" towards PC players.
Nowadays, roughly 99% of games come to PC; for every game that skips PC, there are 100 games that skip PlayStation.
Thus, it seems absurd for PC fans to play the victim with regards to games skipping their platform. Do they bring out their violins whenever an indie dev chooses to port exclusively to Steam? No. As such, these sentiments are apparently based on some arbitrary notion that games skipping console is acceptable, whereas games skipping PC is a moral failure.
This bums me out but I admittedly would mostly play Sony games out of mornid curiousity of how revered the games are, I haven't really cared for most Sony games since the PS2. I wish they were more consistent about the GOG support though, strange what games are on there and what aren't.
@Hustler_One
When listing the reason, I agree I don't think Project Helix is the top reason from a influence perspective, but I imagine Sony executives did not want to live in a world where a Sony tentpole AAA title is playable (albeit x years later) on an Xbox device. Not to mention the possibility that said game could potentially also run better on Helix than PS6. With this decision by Sony, that future will never come to pass. Resolved.
@Chutney Pretty absurd statement, mate. Small devs not having the resources to develop for more than one platform is one thing. A corporation keeping a game exclusive to sell hardware is completely different beast.
@stoper Okay, let's then exclude from consideration those developers who lack the resources to port to console.
That leaves countless cases where the developers absolutely do have the resources to port to console. But, they don't want to. Or, they don't think it will be profitable.
Cold hearted?
We can debate the reasons developers might have for not porting to console, which are varied, I'm sure you can agree.
It's like a PlayStation fan accusing Playground games of being "cold hearted" for not releasing day 1 on PS5: it's silly. But even worse in the case of PC, given the much, much greater number of PC games that exclude PlayStation.
I don`t care about most console games but I really liked last of us and days gone, horizon was quite good too, and I played some returnal.
Still have to try uncharted and ghost of tsushima.
I couldn`t care less about god of war, tired it and it`s extremally boring, spider man is another game I just don`t even want for free.
I would like to play UFC on a PC tho
Anyways, if they don`t want my money, fine.
I will never buy a console, I just hate gamepads, hate locked system with no modding and the hardware is very low end for my standards so they just won`t see my $$$,
I am probably a 50:50 split between consoles and PC, where the PC part is mainly Steam Deck with a bit of sim racing thrown in on my aging desktop. I double-dipped on PlayStation games on Steam primarily to play them on a handheld (either the Deck, or a future, more powerful one). Had PlayStation continued releasing games on PC I wouldn't have been interested at all in their proprietary handheld, so that combined with Steam Machine/Helix means I totally understand their decision. Realistically their efforts were spotty at best anyway so I'm happy for them to focus 100% on console games.
@Max_the_German That's extremely kind of you, thank you! The sort of feedback that you dream of getting. I'll endeavour to keep it up!
Sony sure as hell wouldn't want people to see their games running at higher resolutions and framerates on Microsofts console hybrid,Helix. If as people are saying, it will be a fair chunk more powerful than what Sony have lined up for the PS6.
Sony probably made a mistake by not coughing up the money to utilize effective DRM for their PC Ports which is why sales success was mixed.
If you go to typical pirating sites, Sony ports were day 1 cracked and had hundreds of thousands of downloads on the biggest trackers.
Pirates will deny this, but this does actually hurt sales.
@matmartin True, I never figured out why they didn't Denuvo their games. It was an open invitation for many to wait for PC ports even if they owned a PS.
The only Sony exclusive that I've finished in recent times was Uncharted 4. Though I owned it on PS, shooters never felt right with a gamepad so I enjoyed it on PC a lot more.
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