Sony no longer plans to bring current and future single-player games to personal computers, according to Bloomberg. The report specifically names last year’s Ghost of Yotei and the soon-to-be-released Returnal successor, Saros, as games whose PC plans have been canceled. Some multiplayer and third-party titles will still reach PCs, however.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier cites “people familiar with the company’s plans,” who say that some within the company worry that releasing the games on PC could hurt sales of the PlayStation 5 console, as well as those of its unannounced successor. There could also be concerns that PlayStation titles could end up on competing Xbox hardware if Microsoft makes good on speculation that the next Xbox might play PC games.
There are a few caveats to this change in strategy that are important to note. First, multiplayer titles will still be released cross-platform, including Marathon, a reboot of an old first-person shooter franchise by Bungie (the studio that created Halo, now owned by Sony), slated to release tomorrow on both PlayStation 5 and PC (via Steam).
Also, some games that are effectively first-party titles for the PlayStation 5 but are developed by studios Sony does not own—such as Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and the just-announced Kena: Scars of Kosmora—will still reach PCs.
Finally, Bloomberg’s sources cautioned that Sony’s strategy for single-player releases could change again at some point in the future.
Historically, Sony did not release its first-party games on PCs. That began to change in 2020, and the company has put out titles like Horizon Zero Dawn, Helldivers 2, and Ghost of Tsushima on PCs, among others. Sony’s PC launch experiments haven’t been without confusion or drama, however.
The company was inconsistent about which titles reached the platform and about the timelines for those releases. Single-player titles hit Steam months or even years after their console releases, long after the gaming community buzz around them had died down.
Further, some titles required players sign in to a PlayStation account to access core features, which wasn’t a popular choice with everyone, and the back-and-forth on that policy felt chaotic to many players.
Sony has been less decisive about its PC strategy compared to the other two major console manufacturers. Nintendo simply does not release its games on PC at all, while Microsoft has released all of its first-party Xbox titles on PC.
Bloomberg also notes that some recent releases have not sold as well on PC as hoped, suggesting that Sony’s test-the-waters approach has found said water lukewarm.
