The golden age of Sony bringing its popular PlayStation Exclusives to PC may seemingly be coming to an end if the latest rumors are to be believed. Once thought of as easy as printing money, Sony’s strategy of porting games to PC is said to have changed last year, and moving forward, its single-player titles may stay on the PlayStation console longer, or not be ported over at all. This is from two different sources who’ve claimed the console manufacturer is still working on bringing other titles over to PC, but after them, Sony’s cross-platform support will largely be focused on its live service games.
It hasn’t all been butterflies and roses with Sony’s PC releases. While official sales numbers are rarely, if ever, published, some tracking has been available via Steam. Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition, Spider-Man Remastered, and Ghost of Tsushima are topping the list with 56,557, 66,436, and 77,154 concurrent players, respectively. Other popular titles, such as Horizon Forbidden West and Last of Us Part II, dropped into 30,000-44,000 counts, and other single-player games were even lower. God of War had a peak of 73,529, while the second game only reached 35,615. Stellar Blade most recently set the record with over 190,000 players, which ironically was made by Shift Up, a studio that Sony does not own. Now it is important to note these numbers are only from one storefront, and each could be much higher if taking into account sales from Epic and GOG. Below is a list of Sony’s games published for PC, and notably, its multiplayer HellDivers 2 crushes everything else.
Sony also managed to annoy players from around the world when it began requiring them to register on the PlayStation Network. This requirement further exacerbated things for those who lived in regions that Sony did not provide access to, meaning people could not play games there anyway. Eventually, after several game launches, Sony would backtrack on the requirement, but not before alienating many within the PC gaming community.
Only time will tell if Sony is beholden to shy away from the PC market in regard to future ports. It was just last week that Marvel’s Wolverine was announced for a fall relased and as expected, and normal, it appears to be a console exclusive. There’ve also been recent rumors that a new God War Game is in the works, and Horizon fans are still hoping for a third entry to properly end Alloy’s story. Meanwhile, rumors continue to circulate that neither Sony nor Microsoft is intending to release a new console until at least 2027, which could potentially support these claims made by NateTheHate2 and Jason Schreier, as it’s also theorized that Sony could hold onto its exclusives longer to support sales of its hardware. Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn’t seem as concerned about its hardware sales as it continues its day-one pledge on Game Pass.
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →I mean it makes sense with the steam cube basically being a console.
more importantly future xbox also will effectively be a steam cube
will look bad if PlayStation games are played on a hardware branded as 'xbox'
So they basically told us don't buy a console if you have a PC, but then want to go back to the way things were? Sorry, there is no going back. That ship has sailed.
Kinda depends really... if the RAM/GPU prices don't come back down, we won't have many future PCs that compare vs consoles...
Of course console price will be affected as well, but they can manage it a bit better, and subsidize hardware pricing if they really want to.
Subsidizing hardware just means they loose big on every player who only buys the console for the exclusives. Exactly the type who they exclude by not porting to PC.
They're just butt hurt over the amount of people that switched to PC for a better gaming experience and are anticipating sales of consoles by those that switched.
In my opinion that ship has sailed. Once people switched to PC they're not going back. Not for a couple games.
People will go back if the financial side works. If we go back to $300 consoles, especially in this economy they would get people switching back. I don't see that happening though. Sony raising the price of PS+ to $80 a year and no real discounts being offered in the first year of that change cost them many subscribers. The only people that stayed are the ones who need it for multiplayer.
I'm very curious to hear what their PS5/PS5 Pro sales will be like going forward since 6 isn't expected to arrive until 2027/2028 and they along with MS have both been doing price hikes since Jan 2025.
Sony's ports tend to remain at a frustratingly high price on Steam, even when the port itself is multiple years old and the original game was released back on PS4 or something.
I don't understand why certain publishers, like Capcom, seem to understand that selling a couple thousand copies of a game for $10 is better than having the game not move at all for $20+ dollars, while others like Sony stubbornly refuse to fire sale their ancient IPs.
This might exactly be a panic reaction to slowing HW sales.
LoL $300 consoles. The PS5 Pro is $750.
I could easily speculate that the PS6 will be $1000. Sony doesn't believe in lowering prices. Not even on ancient games.
I've more or less been thinking the same that it and the next Xbox will be $1K.
I was gonna point to the Switch as a lower cost console, but even that is $450 now.
This REALLY pisses me off, cuz I was counting on this current, 9th generation being the first generation since 2nd-gen that I don't get ANY of the consoles. I was planning on never buying a Sony system ever again, and just playing those games on PC. But I guess they hate making money. Just wanna be @ssholes.They must have gotten their hands on some powerful crack.
Yeah, and those same games on console have been on sale for $30, $20, or less, multiple times.
Shiat, right now at Best Buy games like GoW5: Ragnarok are $20, and Spider-Man 2 and GT7 are $30: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/promo/save-on-select-playstation
The most expensive PS4 game I own was $20. All the rest of them were $10 or less. And that's for brand-new physical copies.
Yyyyeeeaaahhh man.
I've bought a few at full price, I think SM1, HZD, GoW) since I didn't shell out for them before but after that I wait for them to be around 30-40% off. I don't remember what the price is now but the last ones I got were SM2+MilesM in a bundle around BF and sad part is I put maybe 20 minutes in SM2 and while it looked great, I'm still not really in the mood for them right now. Still finishing Oblivion Remastered but just put that on hold so I can play RE Requiem (which looks friggin fantastic btw at 4K/HDR/path tracing etc).