In March, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier shared word from anonymous sources that PlayStation was shifting away from releasing their first-party titles on PC. Specifically, the sources shared with Schreier that Sony would no longer release their single-player narrative adventures on PC going forward.
It was hardly an "official" stance from PlayStation given the source of the information. Today, it looks like it's far more official than it was months prior as PlayStation studio business CEO Hermen Hulst told employees that "the company's narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive."
This was announced to employees today during a company town hall meeting on Monday morning. Naturally, Jason Schreier was the first to report on this town hall announcement.
SCOOP: PlayStation studio business CEO Hermen Hulst told staff in a town hall Monday morning that the company's narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive, confirming Bloomberg's reporting from earlier this year.
Sony's output on PC has been mostly fine, but the actual release execution from them was terrible. Every single single-player release was intentionally delayed from release on PC by several months, or even years. When those games did eventually arrive on PC they were almost always full price releases. These late releases also typically came with little to no marketing push from Sony.
And Sony wondered why sales of their games on PC weren't the greatest.
Even some of the game choices were bizarre. For instance, they released Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy on PC while the first three titles were never ported. Jumping into the last releases of a long-running franchise just flat-out did not appeal to PC players. That's not even mentioning their multiplayer GaaS push which fell flat on its face across all platforms. The only new GaaS title that managed to avoid a premature end was Helldivers 2, but Sony sure tried their best to screw that up at one point.
The quality of the games themselves were generally quite good, with a few outliers that needed major patches. Sony absolutely fumbled everything else here. They made no attempt to change or improve sales on PC, and have thus decided to call it quits completely.
Sony's decision here wasn't purely due to poor sales of their titles on PC. It's highly likely that they want to go back to platform exclusives to try to entice players to buy PlayStation 6 hardware when that comes out. That console is already going to be a very difficult sell for many since the price is expected to be heavily impacted by the ever worsening component shortage. There is also the still unconfirmed rumor that Xbox and Project Helix will allow third-party PC installers to run on that new console, and it's not hard to imagine Sony doesn't want their games playable on Xbox.
