Sony Pulls Back From PlayStation Games on PC

[Moonface]

According to anonymous sources familiar with the company's plans, Sony no longer plans to release their big single player titles onto PC; those games will revert to being PS5 exclusive, while online-focused titles such as Marathon and Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls will remain multi-platform releases. Apparently, plans for Ghost of Yotei and other internally developed games to have PC releases were recently scrapped. It's speculated that the shift in strategy may be due to recent PlayStation games not selling well on PC, as well as concerns that releasing games on PC risks damaging the console's brand and hurting PlayStation 5 sales numbers.

Source: Bloomberg

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I remember a long time ago seeing sales/player numbers for various PS5 games released on Steam, and although I can't recall where it was or what all the numbers were I do remember some of them were pretty dire.

[Dragon Lord]

It's not too surprising when you look at the peak player counts for their games released on Steam. While peak player count isn't the be all, end all statistic of a game's success, it does give a decent idea of the way things are trending.

One big trend that really speaks for the situation is when you look at the peak player counts of Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War (2018), then look at the counts for Forbidden West and Ragnarok.

Zero Dawn peaked on Steam at 56,557 players. Forbidden West peaked 16,000 lower than that at 40,462.

God of War (2018) peaked at 73,529 players, compared to Ragnarok that had a MASSIVE drop-off and only peaked at 35,615 players, almost 40K players less than it's predecessor.

So it's pretty obvious that the trend for PlayStation games on Steam is they are attracting less and less players, and as we can see with the God Of War games, it's a pretty massive drop-off too.

Then it only gets worse from there, let's look at the peak player counts of PlayStation's biggest hitters on Steam:

The Last of Us - 36,500
The Last of Us Part II - 30,690 (again, a drop-off compared to the predecessor)
Days Gone - 27,450
Spider-Man - 66,436
Spider-Man 2 - 28,189 (just like Ragnarok, almost a 40K dip in peak player count)
Returnal - 6,691
Until Dawn - 2,607
Lost Soul Aside - 3,070
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection - 10,851
Ghost of Tsushima - 77,154


While again, peak player count isn't everything, it definitely shows the way things are trending and we can see that more recent releases from PlayStation on Steam have been absolutely tanking in the total amount of people who have played them. Seeing this, it's no surprise that PlayStation has decided to stop porting single-player games to PC. Seeing the massive drop-off in the sequels of four of PlayStation's biggest franchises on Steam really tells that after playing the first one, PC players had no interesting in dipping into the sequels. Of course a lot of this is probably the result of the early stages when PlayStation was trying to force people to link a PSN account to their Steam account to be able to play their games. Even if they pulled back on that since then, the PC player base are the best at holding grudges and once you piss them off, they remain pissed off.

Marathon will definitely be a good tell if they can even have success with multiplayer games going forward. While Helldivers II did see major success on the platform (458,709 peak player count), that doesn't guarantee that Marathon will have the same success, though I'm sure PlayStation is expecting it. Will be interesting to see if they are "disappointed" by the game if it doesn't break Helldivers numbers. If Marathon flops, I can imagine that PlayStation will pull back from releasing multiplayer games on PC as well.

For anyone interested, aside from Helldivers II, the only other PlayStation published game on Steam to break 100K player count has been Stellar Blade, which saw a peak of 192,078 players.

[Moonface]

Yeah, and in some cases the PC releases were potentially harmed by certain factors:

• Horizon Zero Dawn was the first time Sony put any first-party game onto PC, but it came almost three years after the PS4 release which everyone naturally expected to be the only platform the game would be on (next-gen ports excluded). PS4 also sold incredibly well, so it's likely most people who wanted to play the game had already done so on PS4 by the time it came to PC. Likewise, anyone who had played Zero Dawn on PS4 probably did the same thing for Forbidden West.
  
  
• God of War Ragnarök seems to be when Sony had implemented a PSN account requirement for all PC games including single-player titles, which not just turned people off but also outright blocked the game from being available in multiple regions. God of War 2018 was released before the PSN requirement was a thing, so it wasn't impacted. I also don't think Ragnarök was that good compared to 2018 and if anyone planning to get Ragnarök on PC saw a lot of opinions that weren't fond of the game I could see it making someone more hesitant to buy the game.
  On a side note, Forbidden West also released after the PSN account requirement was in place, which may have hurt it compared to Zero Dawn which came out before the requirement.
  
  
• Days Gone didn't even seem to do overly well on PS4 considering Sony wouldn't greenlight a sequel, so it doesn't surprise me the PC release didn't do well either.
  
  
• Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection didn't do itself any favors by coming to PC without bringing the Nathan Drake Collection along with it. Uncharted 4 is a great game, but why would anyone want to play it on PC if they hadn't played the first three games? Absolutely none of the story or character arcs in 4 would mean much if you haven't experienced the three games before it that it heavily builds off of. I'd be curious if there would be any difference to this one had Uncharted 1-3 come to PC first so players could actually get introduced to the series from the beginning to make the finale of Uncharted 4 actually have the pay-off it gives.
  

There were also some games like The Last of Us that had horrific performance issues on PC at launch, and although I can't recall what other games had performance issues at launch on PC I would expect that once it started happening multiple times it made people a little wary of trusting a PlayStation PC port to run fine at launch and held off buying it until they knew the game didn't have issues.

I also can't remember what the pricing was for any of the PC ports at launch but if Sony asked for full price (they probably did) that wouldn't exactly be enticing. Ain't nobody jumping to pay full price for a port of a game that is multiple years old, especially on Steam where sales are a dime a dozen.