We had it good for a few years, didn’t we? Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War…for a while there PlayStation games kept coming out on PC and it kept being a real treat for those who either didn’t have PlayStation consoles or (like me) did and just preferred playing games on their PC.
Sadly those days now appear to be over, with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reporting that Sony “no longer plans to release its big PlayStation 5 games on PC, a major shift in strategy that sees the video-game maker returning to console exclusivity after six years of flirting with multi-platform releases”.
This won’t apply to multiplayer experiences like Marathon, which as you’d expect will (and other future multiplayer games like it) still come out on PC, but as far as PlayStation’s flagship singleplayer series like The Last Of Us are concerned, Sony’s personal computer experiment seems over.
To Echo Everyone Else’s Thoughts, I Too Wish Marathon Was A Singleplayer Video Game
We couldn’t even get a little campaign in there?
From a business standpoint, I can see how this makes sense. While I’ve personally enjoyed playing some PlayStation games on my PC, and have really enjoyed playing a ton of Xbox games over the years–from Halo to Forza–the fact I haven’t owned an Xbox console since 2013 (mostly because of that fact!) speaks to the main reason Sony are pulling back on this experiment. For all the arguments that the more marketplaces you sell your games on the more games you sell, PlayStation’s business model heavily relies on selling PlayStations.
From a personal standpoint, though, it’s a bummer. I share my living room TV with my whole family, which cuts down on the time available to me that I can spend playing a console game. In my office, though, on the same PC I’m currently typing this blog on, I can play as long as I want! And while those are my own very personal circumstances, I bet there’s all kinds of stories out there of people who really appreciated being able to play a PlayStation game on their PC, and either owned a PS5 already or, because of everything going on around us, were never going to buy one anyway.