God of War Ragnarok

Sony Santa Monica

Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Herman Hulst has reportedly sent out a message to the PlayStation crew that a decision had been made: first-party, single-player PlayStation games will no longer be heading to PC, whether that be on a weeks, months or years-long delay.

This corroborates Bloomberg's previous reporting that Sony was about to do just that, and it’s sparked a debate among fans about whether it was the right or wrong move. The answer is split; it is likely the right move for PlayStation, but there’s no real benefit to players, who are simply losing purchase options.

Sony started this experiment in earnest in 2020 when it ported Horizon Zero Dawn to PC, over three years after its initial release. That spread to other big titles over time, including God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, The Last of Us Part I and II, Uncharted Legacy of Thieves, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, God of War Ragnarok and more.

The games did decently enough, but were hardly monster releases on PC. The highest first-party exclusive, Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut, hit 77,154 concurrent players on Steam at its peak. That and all the aforementioned games were dunked on by a non-first-party PS5 console exclusive, Stellar Blade, which had 192,0778 concurrent players at its peak, just over a year after its PS5 release.

The idea here is that Sony has not tapped into a large enough market to outweigh the potential dilution of its brand, and that its argument for continuing to sell PlayStation hardware is weakening. It has become increasingly difficult to convince players to buy video game hardware over the last year or two especially amid dramatic price hikes driven by global economic conditions, tariffs, and component shortages and costs, mainly due to AI. A PS5 Pro now costs a full $900. There are no signs this is getting better, and it’s easy to imagine what may be a somewhat absurd cost for a potential PS6 in 2-3 years.

Sony wants to recenter itself as a hardware-first platform for its highest-profile games, and I believe they’re looking at Xbox (sorry, XBOX) as a model they do not want to emulate, spreading its releases across every platform, including now PlayStation itself, and previously doing day one PC releases for years already. This, at least in part, has likely contributed to dismal Xbox hardware sales. Xbox itself now may be considering pulling back its former exclusives per its new leadership, attempting to undo what it believes are mistakes the previous administration made.

Sony does not want PlayStation to become an “I’ll just wait for the PC release” console. They want to sell hardware. This is…not good for the consumer, of course, forcing them to buy an expensive system if they already have a somewhat expensive PC if they want to play those games, and if this never happened in the first place, they would have never had access to a dozen stellar games from the PS catalog. The argument that this is “good” for consumers is the idea of getting back to a healthy PlayStation vs. Xbox vs. Nintendo vs. PC battle that pushes each to be better (and incidentally, no one complains that Nintendo has and will do this forever).

The exception to all this is Sony’s multiplayer games, as titles like those need expansion on PC to build out their live-service player bases, and that practice will continue. Sony has already seen that huge hits like Helldivers 2 and the recent Marathon have PC playerbases that outweigh console, often by a significant margin, so it’s not going to wipe that out in the name of pulling those to consoles alone.

It makes sense for Sony, but no, it’s not great for PC players, obviously, and their time in the sun getting all these releases is about to come to an end.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.