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.
I think they’re finally worried about Valve and Steam.
In what way?
Every game they release on Steam is adding value to Valve’s hardware. It’s fundamentally not that different to Sony releasing games on the Xbox or Switch.
Potentially good for software sales, but a death sentence for future hardware sales that rely on exclusivity to justify the platform’s existence.
That Steam is actually a competitor to Playstation. Even more so with the Steam Deck and future Steam Machine in living room. It’s no longer this “oh it’s PC, a different audience”.