Sony reportedly exiting PC game market

Sony is reportedly moving away from PC ports for its first-party games, with games like Ghost of Yotei and the upcoming Saros being among the affected titles. This rumour comes after years of experimenting with PlayStation on PC, which apparently has not produced as desirable a result as the company would’ve liked.

Bloomberg, which first broke the story, reported the reasons as lacklustre sales of those ports, as well as the potential to harm sales of the PS5 and its follow-ups in the long run, the latter supposedly a concern for a faction within PlayStation. It’s worth noting that this has resulted in the scrapping of PC ports which were already in production, including for Ghost of Yotei.

Online multiplayer games, however, such as the upcoming Marvel Tokon and Marathon, will still release on PC, no doubt as console exclusivity would be detrimental for their mass appeal. At the same time, other Sony-published games such as Death Stranding 2 and Kena: Scars of Kosmora will retain their planned PC ports, so it looks like first-party games made by studios Sony could be safe.

But if true, this move is a rather conservative shift from Sony, which began porting its games over to PC with the start of the ninth generation of consoles. Moreover, it also marks a reversal of the decline of console exclusivity, which has slowly been eroding between Xbox and PlayStation as their parent companies look for their elusive share of the PC market pie.

Well, at least on Sony’s part. Of the big three console brands, it could be argued that PlayStation is the most awkwardly positioned when it comes to PC.

Microsoft, owning both Xbox and Windows, stands to gain either way from games appearing on PC; Xbox Play Anywhere and Game Pass are evidence that some cannibalisation of console sales is acceptable if it leads to a greater overall market share. Nintendo, on the other hand, is defined by its games being exclusive to their console, and as such has never had a horse in this race.

This leaves Sony in a weird spot; its triple-A, blockbuster titles would theoretically have massive appeal to the PC crowd, but it’s a risky proposition as sales would have to be high to justify the loss of the PS5’s exclusivity appeal.

The company has tried to work its way around it, including through delayed PC ports for its single-player games, but apparently it’s not been enough. If tepid sales numbers of PlayStation games on PC is true, then perhaps for the Japanese conglomerate, nothing is better than going all-in on their console the old-fashioned way.

Source: Bloomberg