Sony Interactive Entertainment previously had a reputation of being very PC-averse, but the stance has been softening in recent years with the likes of God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn now being on the platform. A hiring notice for a Senior Director for PC Planning and Strategy would also imply that PlayStation is opening the floodgates. Now, in an investor relations briefing, it looks like the company is truly looking beyond its own console platform, as it looks to expand more into PC and, worryingly, mobile.
According to page 34 of the slides shown during said briefing, PlayStation projects its first-party output by its fiscal year 2025 to be 50% on the PS5. While this is expected, the remaining half is where things get interesting. Of those, 30% of the company’s first-party releases will be on PC, with the remaining 20% being on mobile. By then, it would have completely phased out PS4 releases.
The good news is that the company is investing a lot more into the PC space. On the flip side, it’s understandable that the company would want a bigger presence in the mobile space. VGC quotes PlayStation head Jim Ryan as saying that by expending into PC, mobile and live services, the company has the opportunity to grow from “being present in a very narrow segment of the overall gaming software market, to being present pretty much anywhere”. Within the same set of slides, SIE says that it plans to have 12 live service titles by 2025.
Mobile games are a cause for concern simply because many of them have very simplistic and minimal gameplay, frequently used simply as a vessel to drive microtransactions. And while live service titles usually fare better, there are enough examples of such games launching broken and needing time to be fixed, delaying the constant content output that defines the live-service categorisation.
(Source: Sony [PDF] via Push Square, VGC)
