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.
Refusing to release titles to the PC isn’t going to make me run out and purchase a console. There are tons of games on PC. My backlog is long enough that I can live happily without whatever kind of bullshit Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox are trying to peddle. Assuming I did care about a specific title, and it’s being gate locked by console exclusivity, I’ll fucking pirate it. Sony, Microslop, and Nintendo can all get fucked.
I also kind of think that the strongest argument for console gaming is competitive multiplayer, not single player.
The fact that the consoles are closed and locked down inherently provides resistance to cheating and such, where the open PC world tries to (poorly) replicate a closed environment via kernel anti-cheat stuff. The console world having (well, more-or-less) one option when it comes to hardware means that everyone playing against each other has a fairly-level playing field — same input hardware, and people don’t get an edge from having fancier rendering hardware.
For single-player gaming, those console strengths become weaknesses — for single-player games, it’s preferable for the player to be able to do things like freely mod games, upgrade hardware to get fancier graphics, provide a lot of options as to what input stuff to use, etc. It doesn’t hurt anyone else for me to have the game running however I want, so I should be able to do so. On the PC, a player gets to enjoy all that.
If I were a console vendor and I were worried about the PC as a competing platform, I’d think that I’d try to emphasize my competitive multiplayer games, not single-player games.
They keep forgetting this, Xbox thought it too. We are with our digital libraries, I’m not going to go buy a PS5 because of one game. The hardware is only the portal.
I like playing Sony games on PC from time to time but it they don’t release anything more on PC that is OK too, I have plenty of other stuff to play anyway.
They’re going to learn that the days when publishers could strongarm gamers are over. There are too many games on too many alternatives, so it’s too easy for gamers, faced with unnecessary hoops through which they’re required to jump, to just say, “Well fuck that then - I’ll play something else.”
Its REALLY easy to just not buy their shit then.
Sony: “Exclusivity will increase sales!”
Customers: “I can’t afford your exclusivity”
I can afford it, and I’ll bet I’m far from alone, but I’d essentially be buying a dedicated computer that can only play a handful of games, and it would play them worse than my PC could if they’d only make the game available there. There’s no shortage of stuff to play, so it ends up just being a bad value even when you’ve got the money.
Exactly. I could walk in and buy the entire ps5 library right now and a pro or max or wtfever they’re shilling now days… but why would I? Why would I shell out cash for an inferior environment, inferior hardware, and an inferior experience?
The PS5 Pro is way overpriced and the regular PS5 doesn’t really have many exclusives over PS4 so it’s not a big surprise they can’t move consoles
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.
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.
The only way this makes sense is if Sony feels they’ve cornered enough of the market to be able to recoup the enormous costs of AAA development. I don’t see how that’s possible without a huge price increase of the console and games.
This makes a lot of sense if the next Xbox is just a glorified PC. Right now Sony releases some of their games to PC, but never to Xbox. Multiplayer titles really are the ones that make no sense being exclusive because you need that extended network effect
I don’t think keeping the single player games exclusive makes much sense either. Sony’s bread is buttered by taking the same 30% Valve makes on each game sale. If they’re only converting you for single player games, you’re buying…what…5 games on the platform, lifetime? And they’re all Sony published? Realistically, on PC, you’re probably already playing everything else on PC with no subscription fee that they would want to get a cut from. I think Sony has reached everyone they’re going to reach, and you’re just leaving money on the table by not bringing those games to PC, even if they come late.
The exclusive games lead to more sales of other games. If they get rid of exclusives they might as well just give it up and end the PlayStation brand.
PC may be fine for you, but it’s still a shit show IMO. Maybe Valve will fix it. Gaming on Linux has gotten way better since the SteamDeck came out, but still not good enough to get me to switch. Maybe the Steam Machine will eventually turn the tides. But hell, they take 30% too, so really no different than Sony from a developer’s perspective
I don’t think the Xbox or PlayStation brand will end anytime soon, but trying to keep doing things the way they’ve been done makes about as much sense as a cable company fighting against the rise of streaming television. PC is the largest single platform and is still growing, and even despite the complete obliteration of Sony’s closest competitor, PlayStation 5 hasn’t grown compared to 4; their growth has only come from selling at higher prices to the same number of users and from microtransactions from games that they don’t make themselves which are available on many platforms. Which doesn’t mean that they don’t still have their customers like yourself, but if I already decided to play my games on PC, how on earth are they going to convince me to start buying third party games on PlayStation, where their money is actually made? At the very least, they can offer me the ability to buy their big blockbusters (which often cost more to make than they’re seeing back in returns these days) on PC to recoup some of what they spent.
