Sony is reversing a multi-year strategy to bring its biggest PlayStation 5 exclusives to PC, Bloomberg reports. While multiplayer games like Marathon will continue being released on Steam, the only way to play single-player blockbusters like last year’s Ghost of Yotei will be to buy Sony’s console.
According to Bloomberg, this pullback on PC ports will apply to Housemarque’s upcoming sci-fi action shooter Saros as well. The studio’s last game, Returnal, came to PS5 in 2021 and released on Steam two years later. It got good reviews but apparently didn’t sell well enough to justify the sacrifice of any PS5 console sales that may have potentially been cannibalized in the process.
The new strategy, just like the old one, is subject to change depending on how the gaming marketplace evolves over the next few years, but it sounds like for the time being players shouldn’t expect future first-party Sony blockbusters like Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Wolverine and Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet to appear on PC.
Spider-Man 2 made the jump from PS5 to Steam in record time but with little fanfare or marketing and appeared to sell poorly as a result. As we covered over the weekend, Sony’s new calculus may be that it’s better to have a smaller group of PC players actually buy a PS5 than just sell a few hundred thousand extra copies of games like God of War.
This is in stark contrast to Microsoft’s multiplatform pivot. Having all but given up on Xbox hardware, the tech giant has raced to sell its games in as many places as possible, including on PS5. A remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is set to bring the iconic Xbox franchise to the rival platform for the first time ever later this year.
