The video-game publisher no longer plans to put out PC ports of PlayStation games such as ‘Ghost of Yotei’
The full article that was hinted at in interviews last week.
There are likely a few reasons behind this shift. One is that several recent PlayStation games have not sold well on PC.
Interesting…
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.
I love Horizon: Zero Dawn. I have not played Horizon: Forbidden West. By the time it came to PC, Sony started making PSN logins necessary to even authenticate the game in the first place, which is basically just the worst kind of DRM. They’ve reverted this policy, but now I don’t trust them. They put out a handful of games on GOG where I don’t have to trust them, and I’ll probably still pick a few of those up one day, but Forbidden West isn’t there. Seems to me that they have no idea how badly they screwed up this rollout themselves. Oh, Uncharted 4 didn’t do too well on PC? Where are the PC versions of Uncharted 1-3? Where can I play the original God of War trilogy? I’m not buying a PlayStation no matter how many exclusives you lock up there, so I’ll just continue to not play your handful of exclusives.
From one of the other articles about this I read, they are seeing the same data but interpreting dumbly. They aren’t seeing the kind of explosive sales they want during the period the games are locked to the Playstation and it doesn’t pick up after they release it to other platforms because the hype train has halted by then.
Why they think just dropping other platforms will help more than simultaneously releasing them everywhere is pretty silly when that is their reasoning.
When almost half of their income comes from MTX and other services purchases, their first-party games were never, ever going to be simultaneous releases. Sony wants as many users platformed in their ecosystem as possible, and exclusivity is one of the ways you do that. This was a pretty simple ROI calculation, and when you’re already losing Steam’s cut, it would take solid performance to be worthwhile.
The above comment mentions goodwill, and that’s another thing; Sony burnt up the goodwill they earned with PC users (and probably then some) with the PSN nonsense for these ports. It’s like how Nvidia continually gets bad press for their gaming GPU division, at some point you gotta look at how it’s affecting your overall brand.
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From one of the other articles about this I read, they are seeing the same data but interpreting dumbly. They aren’t seeing the kind of explosive sales they want during the period the games are locked to the Playstation and it doesn’t pick up after they release it to other platforms because the hype train has halted by then.
Why they think just dropping other platforms will help more than simultaneously releasing them everywhere is pretty silly when that is their reasoning.
When almost half of their income comes from MTX and other services purchases, their first-party games were never, ever going to be simultaneous releases. Sony wants as many users platformed in their ecosystem as possible, and exclusivity is one of the ways you do that. This was a pretty simple ROI calculation, and when you’re already losing Steam’s cut, it would take solid performance to be worthwhile.
The above comment mentions goodwill, and that’s another thing; Sony burnt up the goodwill they earned with PC users (and probably then some) with the PSN nonsense for these ports. It’s like how Nvidia continually gets bad press for their gaming GPU division, at some point you gotta look at how it’s affecting your overall brand.