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.
Anyway, that’s my two cents.
And at least some of their flagship games were ported to PC by a developer that didn’t bother with optimization, leading to ridiculously high system requirements, so only a fraction of PC gamers would reasonably be able play them. (I’m looking at you, The Last of Us.)
High prices, late releases, badly performing ports, forced online accounts… Each of these mistakes is a slap in a potential customer’s face. Together, they practically guarantee poor sales.
Maybe they think recent RAM and GPU prices will lead many PC gamers to start buying Playstations? I doubt it.