A month ago, PlayStation reportedly pulled the plug on its PC port initiative for first party releases. There was no official announcement made to the public, but PlayStation Studios head Herman Hulst is said to have broke the news to employees in a town hall. Moving forward, any single-player games would prioritize PlayStation over any other platform.
It may have started off rocky, but over time, the PC ports of PlayStation titles began to hit their stride, offering PC gamers the opportunity to check out some of Sony’s critically-acclaimed titles on their platform of choice. Now that’s over, and I’m sad.
If You Want to Play Wolverine, You Probably Have to Buy a PS5 – Sony Might Be Pulling Back on Its PC Ports
According to recent rumors from an industry insider, those hoping to play Marvel’s Wolverine on PC might be out of luck.
Make no mistake, I own a PlayStation 5 Pro and am there on Day 1 to check out the latest and greatest that Sony has to release. I’ll be there on September 24 for the release of Insomniac Games’ Wolverine and in early 2027 (reportedly) for God of War Laufey, but I always looked forward to those PC ports all the same.
Regardless of how powerful the PlayStation 5 Pro is, it can’t stand up to a top-tier PC gaming rig. With a 5090 working overdrive, and usually with some DLSS voodoo running in the background, these PlayStation PC ports were simply sublime running at an uncapped frame rate.
You don’t truly appreciate the responsiveness and the technical prowess of games like Spider-Man 2 or Ghost of Tsushima until you see them running at 120 FPS+. Call it PC gamer snobbery or what have you, but once you experience it, it’s hard to go back.
Similarly, I loved looking at the PS5 versions of some gorgeous games, knowing that, in around a year, I would get to see them at their highest fidelity. 4K with everything turned to the highest settings, with minimal compromises. Honestly, even though I typically would have completed the game on PlayStation 5 — and maybe even gotten the Platinum — I would oftentimes end up progressing much farther in the PC version than I’d anticipated just to see some of my favorite moments in the game.
Admittedly, this was mostly for comparison’s sake, but there are a lot of people out there who would log multiple playthroughs of games and appreciate having a different experience on PC. Usually, the PC version also features any previously-released DLC, so if you had perhaps missed out on an add-on or expansion, then there was the opportunity to see that new content on the second go-around. Whatever your reason for checking out a PlayStation exclusive on PC, they were all valid, but now that’s gone.
Click on the game with the higher OpenCritic rating.
Saros, a game where precision, fidelity, and performance coalesce into a deadly ballet of bullets, seemingly won’t make the leap to PC like its predecessor Returnal did. I can only imagine how impressive that game would look on PC, and now, imagining is all I’ve got.
I know the argument can be made that if Sony is pulling the plug on PlayStation ports, then that means they weren’t selling well. And while the numbers tell us that is true, I can still be disappointed in the decision. There was a market for the ports, no matter how small, and those folks will no longer have the opportunity to check out those games. And, at a time when consoles are more expensive than they’ve ever been, the prospect of just buying a PlayStation 5 is easier said than done.
Maybe we will see some games on PC, but right now it seems like Sony has a new plan in store for PlayStation, and that is not just console exclusivity but outright exclusivity. XBOX seems to be taking that stance in terms of consoles by pulling back from its PS5 ports, but it still has PC versions of its first-party titles.
Sony has made a change, and that’s its prerogative, but I’m sad we won’t get to know what games like Wolverine or Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet would look like on PC. I guess we will have to wait for the inevitable PS6 version to get the closest approximation to that.
