His full story is forthcoming, but I don’t know how that squares with incoming PC ports for Death Stranding 2 and the sequel to Kena. Maybe because they’re only Sony published? Exclusivity of a handful of games that I may or may not be interested in still isn’t going to make me want a PS5, personally.
My guess is they’re watching the PC parts supply issues due to AI and have decided they will use their institutional weight to also hoard parts to push consoles back to the forefront since it’s harder to pirate on consoles and easier to resell the same game on new console generations.
Sony is and has been a big institutional player and I would not be at all surprised to see them moving on hoarding parts themselves: for AI, for consumer electronics, for game consoles. They’ve been practically waiting for a way to kill the PC industry and take the profits from it.
I have nothing but anecdotes to base this on, but charging for PS+ in an era where Steam offers a similar service for free has seemingly been one of the biggest drivers of converting people into PC gamers. Back when Xbox first charged for Live, it at least offered a far better experience than what you’d find elsewhere, but only a few years later, that was no longer the case.
You’re seriously overinflating the size of Sony (or seriously underestimating the cost of hoarding parts). Sony market cap is 130 billion. Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft combined are expected to spend 600 billion in 2026 to buy up hardware for their data centers. And that 600 billion is just 4 companies for this year (they spent almost 400 billion last year). There are bunch of other deals that also lock up hardware production like the Stargate project which also plans on spending 500 billion to build data centers. And bunch of unknown deals, like Apple definitely has some deal that guarantees they get their hardware.
Hoarding all the hardware is extremely expensive and Sony wouldn’t make dent even if they wanted to.
Even if they cannot hoard that much themselves, anything they hoard will contribute to the death of the PC space and I don’t think Sony is just going to let their consumer electronics division, which has been a huge part of their brand for decades, go quietly into that good night. They might not have as much money to spend on it, but they’re not going to just stop making PS5s and other consumer electronics devices. That also means that if there’s PC hardware shortages for the foreseeable future, that they’re waiting for those shortages to strangle the PC gaming industry and revert a lot of those PC gaming converts back to console.
The hardware shortage is also impacting Sony. Usually console hardware prices go down after launch, Playstation 5 went up. From their latest earnings call Playstation 5 sales are also slowing down and they’re focusing on the monetization of existing Playstation 5 owners instead of selling more consoles. And rumors are that Playstation 6 launch has gone from planned 2027/2028 launch to a planned 2028/2029 launch due to the same hardware shortage. What is strangling the PC market is also strangling the console market.