Shuhei Yoshida, the former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), has surprisingly come to the defense of PC Ports, stating that they have been largely positive for the company.
Yoshida says that the PC ports of Sony PlayStation games financially help the company recoup some of the initial development costs. By virtue of the ports of popular single-player titles arriving a year or two later, it gives the game an additional sales cycle and even more coverage, the latter mostly in how it performs on PC, now that it has access to beefier hardware that the PlayStation 5 (PS5) clearly is starting to lack.
Shooting Itself In The (Financial) Foot
This next point is just a personal opinion of this writer, but we’re with Yoshida on this one. Look, we get it: you have both a product and a brand that you want, nay, have to maintain, and like any good company, you do what you must to keep it. In this case, ceasing all ports of first-party, single-player titles to the PC isn’t suicide, but it is certainly a loss of revenue from an another source.
Take Santa Monica’s 2018 God of War and its sequel, God of War Ragnarok. The combined sales when both titles went on sale on PC totalled US$1.4 billion (~RM5.55 billion). There’s also the PC port of Ghost of Tsushima. When the game was released on PC in 2024, it sold more than 800,000 copies in the first few days. At the time of writing, that number is believed to have peaked at three million copies.
Mind you, Sony isn’t giving up the PC space altogether. While it says it won’t release any more of its hit single-player titles on PC, it will still continue to release online multiplayer titles for the platform. Many have surmised that this is likely due to the massive popularity of titles like Arrowhead Studios’ Helldivers 2, which first started off as a PlayStation exclusive.
(Source: TweakTown)
