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PlayStation Exclusives Aren't Coming To PC Anymore (theverge.com) 53

Posted by BeauHD from the pivot-to-consoles dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Sony reportedly won't release its major single-player PlayStation games on PC anymore. According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Hermen Hulst, who heads up PlayStation's studios business, informed employees in a town hall on Monday about the change in strategy. Schreier had previously reported on the shift in March, saying that Sony scrapped plans to launch PC versions of last year's Ghost of Ytei and "other internally developed games." Online games will still come to multiple platforms following this change in strategy, Schreier reported at the time.

In recent years, Sony has released many of its biggest games on PC, including Spider-Man 2, Ghost of Tsushima, both The Last of Us games, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, and multiplayer titles like Helldivers 2 and Marathon. Two years ago, Hulst committed to releasing PlayStation's live-service games "day and date" on PC and PS5, but its single-player PC releases have been less consistent, with Hulst saying that the company takes a "more strategic approach." In April, Microsoft's new Xbox chief Asha Sharma said the company is "reevaluating" exclusive games for the platform. "Players are frustrated," she wrote in a memo. "New feature drops on console have been less frequent. Our presence on PC isn't strong enough. Pricing is getting harder for people to keep up with. And core experiences like search, discovery, social, and personalization still feel too fragmented."

"The model that got us here won't be the one that takes us forward," the memo adds.

PlayStation Exclusives Aren't Coming To PC Anymore More | Reply

PlayStation Exclusives Aren't Coming To PC Anymore

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  • They never were. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 )

    PlayStation exclusives have never been released on PC before, have yet to be released, and now plans to make releases have been canceled. There is no "anymore" in there because it never happened.

    Here's a proper title:

    Sony Scraps Plan for PlayStation Exclusives On PC

    • Are you complaining about the long established indulgent practice by game console companies where they call something 'exclusive' when they mean 'there is a limited window time where it's on our console but nowhere else'?

      You're probably like 20 years too late to get mad about this.

      • Are you complaining about the long established indulgent practice by game console companies where they call something 'exclusive'

        No, I'm complaining that it's being reported as if a practice of releasing "PlayStation Exclusive" titles on PC has stopped. However, the reality is that it had never actually started. I thought my suggested title would have made it apparent but I think that would require you read my comment in the first place.

        • Sony have used the phrase "Playstation Exclusive" (note the capital E that you also used) for decades. There has been a window over the last 4 years or so where titles that would have previously been released only on a Sony console were also ported to PC.

          Initially during this period they used the term "Console Exclusive" to denote the game's lack of availability on rival consoles (mostly just the Xbox line). They pretty quickly dropped this because, in their minds, consumers think of PCs and consoles as dif

    • ... Here's a proper title:

      Sony Scraps Plan for PlayStation Exclusives On PC

      Um... Neither you, TFS and TFA seems to understand what "exclusive" means. A "Playstation Exclusive" would mean only on Playstation, so also releasing it on PC would be the opposite of that. Just sayin'. I know it's quaint these days, especially politically, but words actually have meanings. /pedantic :-)

      • If you want to be pedantic then you need to include time. Yes there were plenty of Playstation exclusive titles which were released on PC. These were very much exclusive at the time of development, and exclusive for many years after release. The fact that they were released on PC later doesn't make them any less exclusive at the time. /actually pedantic.

        • Good points, though then at the time they're released on PC they should be called "Formerly Playstation Exclusive". :-)

          (I'm not a gamer, and am really just commenting on the ridiculousness of the marketing.)

    • Re:They never were. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @02:59AM (#66150655)

      PlayStation exclusives have never been released on PC before, have yet to be released, and now plans to make releases have been canceled. There is no "anymore" in there because it never happened.

      Errr what are you smoking? There have been multiple Playstation exclusive inhouse developed games that were released on PC after their change of direction around the COVID time. TFS even lists some.

      • I think the point being made is that something CANNOT be a playstation exclusive if it is released on PC, by definition.

        • The point being made is that they were very much Playstation exclusive titles which were *later* released on PC. Time matters. They were very much also Playstation exclusive titles which at the time of development had no plans to ever be released on the PC, which was later changed.

    • Re:They never were. (Score:4, Informative)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @11:20AM (#66151171)

      PlayStation exclusives have never been released on PC before, have yet to be released.

      There have been a few former PS exclusives in recent years: God of War (2018), God of War Ragnarök, Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales to name a few.

  • There aren't a lot of AAA PC games these days and Sony's releases were some of the few we got and they were all the very high quality.

    But this isn't because they're trying to be evil or anything they just aren't selling enough copies to justify the ports.

    If the cost of a PS5 was low I could see that because people would just buy the PS5 and not bother with the PC version but with a PlayStation 5 pushing $700 for the base console that doesn't seems like it wouldn't be the case. I don't know the demog

    • yeah there's a reason for that (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The PC ports came a lot later than the PS5 versions -- which makes sense because it's all hands on deck to get the PS5 version out, then they can spend time making the PC port. But in the intervening 6 months most people who really wanted the game already bought it. The people who didn't really want the game are probably going to wait for a Steam sale so that cuts down on the PC revenue even further.

      Frankly the fact that PC ports existed at all has always been a mystery to me, in the same way that Saturn po

    • I don't think there's any evidence that they aren't selling well, and even then it's truly a question of cost. A quick search shows that Horizon Forbidden West was estimated to have 1/3rd the number of players on PC than the PS5. Think about that for a moment, that's a 33% sales increase for what amounts to a tiny amount of effort porting a fully developed game to another platform.

      But that may be a lowball example too. Look to Helldivers 2 for which we have actual numbers. There the PC player base is 4x the

      • Sony themselves said they didn't sell well (Score:4, Interesting)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @08:31AM (#66150929)
        And that was the reason why they were pulling them, not the desire for exclusivity.

        Pulling them off of PC is actually a problem for Sony because modern AAA games are so expensive to produce that it's difficult for them to be profitable on a single platform. Even when you have the most popular platform out there like Sony does.

        I don't think helldivers was ever really designed to be a PlayStation exclusive. Also don't think it was meant to take off like it did. It's closer to a AA game in scope. When you play something like the Horizon games with all the voice acting and cut scenes and incredibly elaborate animation and dozens of different features and options and hyperbalanced gameplay you are looking at something that had a ridiculous budget.

        So something like helldivers 2 had somewhere around 50 to 70 million dollar budget versus the 200 million they spend on Horizon Forbidden West.

        Also the hell divers games were in development for 8 years, a lot of the budget was just development hell where is the Spider-Man games or the Horizon games cost that much even when the games were making solid progress in development because they were just so freaking huge in scope.

        Sony came to the PC hoping to make enough money to make the games themselves profitable or at least break even. It doesn't seem like a modern single player, triple A game can be profitable. Even Grand theft Auto needs to rely heavily on multiplayer content to do it.
    • They're counting on sales boost from GTA 6. Also, rumors on upcoming console generations have gone from "probably 2027" to "might start seeing early Dev prototypes by end of 2027 and consumer launches in 28 or 29."

  • This sure does look at bit like someone in the global sony exec not understanding that Bungie's failure with Marathon was as much their fault as Bungie's and blaming the whole thing on PC gaming as a whole.

    That and believing that they don't need to compete with the xbox any more.

    Lets see how that goes for them, I guess.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Of course. The problem was, Sony thought they were doing Microsoft dirty by buying up Bungie. After all, Bungie propelled Microsoft big into the console market with Halo, and what a coup it would be for Sony to buy Bungie out from Microsoft.

      The problem is Sony was trying to get them into a market they themselves have saturated - the Games as a Service - or the market of online team shooters along the gist of Fortnite, Destiny and others. If you look at them, most of them were done by Sony - they had practic

      • It's sad if they've convinced themselves that because some customers are gullible idiots they can herd everyone else, but it's not all that surprising I guess. Late capitalism and all that...

  • Already the RAM-GPU-SSD prices are going to be a big part of how the video game market works.

    Will the high prices favor consoles - which often take a loss on their hardware?
    Or will they favor PCs which are far more expensive but you can do other things besides play games on and also the games are far, far, faaar cheaper?

    In the past high hardware prices seems to have favored consoles, but the PC gaming world was a lot smaller back then. Nowdays computers are even more nessessary for life, far more games are

    • I'd say, if the economy really tanks, the market will be cheap PCs, like the mini-PCs you find on Amazon that are pretty much a laptop motherboard in a small case. Those are surprisingly decent, and some can handle an eGPU.

      If I were betting on a recession, I'd develop for low tier Windows and built in GPUs, and distribute the game via Steam, GOG, and the Windows Store. This way, it is accessible to virtually everyone, GOG's DRM is good enough (i.e. none), and as a game dev, I can focus on relevant content

      • Yeah, I think you're right. If we're heading towards a recession high hardware prices + low income would probably hurt consoles and just all AAA games a lot. Probably the biggest winner would be phone games - everyone has a phone and has to have one. Then pc games that everyone can run like stardew valley.
        On the other hand, a lot of people are going to be spending a lot on hardware just to play GTA 6. If you compare cruises and going to Disney every year and hanging out in high-end bars - buying a fancy com

  • You really have to be a disconnected executive to say stuff like "people didn't like having access to our games, so we'll stop selling to them".

    • Also "PC gamers are the reason that Concorde and Marathon failed, even though they also failed on Playstation. If they were exclusive to Playstation they would have succeeded" is uh... an unproven premise. Speculative.

      Execs are certainly not immune to cope to prevent themselves having to take responsibility for poor decision making.

  • Because that's how you get PS5 emulators.

  • Seems a little retrograde (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @04:04AM (#66150735)
    I wonder if Sony is getting a bit scared of Valve. Maybe they're even seeing how well their games are selling on the PC and the fact they're selling well scares them even more than if they didn't.

    But at the end of the day it's free money. Sell the game exclusive on the console for a year or two and when it's back catalogue port it over to the PC and sell it again.

    • Sell the game exclusive on the console for a year or two and when it's back catalogue port it over to the PC and sell it again.

      That's what they are doing right now. This is the process they are backing away from. All the major PC releases from Sony have been at least timed exclusives. That's what is so baffling about this all, it's almost like it's free money they don't want. (Well almost free, making the port does require some effort).

      It's not like they are fighting Xbox to win the console gaming wars anymore. They've effectively won that already. This strategy makes little sense to me.

  • It's not about sales (Score:3)

    by EldoranDark ( 10182303 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @05:58AM (#66150797)
    It's about building up FOMO ahead of PS6 marketing launch. Or even better, have more people get a PS5 they thought they wouldn't need. Wait a few more years and someone will work out that opening up PC revenues stream sounds mighty fine.
  • Denovu is cracked and we will either wait for a new rootkit, or never trust future rootkits depending on how successful the PC sales were

  • That's fine, I'll just play them a few years from now on an emulator and Sony won't make any money off it.

    • Pretty much. I have a PS5 that hardly gets used and I'm not going to shell out a kilobuck for the PS6 just to play Horizon 3 (which AFAIK hasn't even started developoment yet, just their silly royale game no one asked for).
  • Ok, at first I thought it meant all "Exclusive" Games. But it's just Sony developed ones. So anyways.

  • Because of XBOX (Score:4, Informative)

    by more_pickles ( 4913613 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @08:47AM (#66150957)
    I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but this move is almost certainly because of XBOX. Microsoft has already announced that their next console will play PC games. I think that move was largely a way for Microsoft to get PC-ported Playstation games on XBOX. Sony probably has no problem with their games on the PC, but there's no way they want to support their competitor's dedicated console when they make so much money on Playstation.

  • I won't waste money of bags of crap like Horizon Forbidden West anymore.

  • Well, yes, that's what the word "exclusive" means.

  • We have plenty of games (Score:3)

    by flibbidyfloo ( 451053 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @11:53AM (#66151199)
    At this point, as long as Steam and GOG stay up and running with their current catalogs, the entire video game development industry could self-destruct and any gamer over 30 would have enough stuff to play until they die. The younger generation of players would have time to create a new industry from scratch for themselves :)

    • I daresay that already exists even... and it's friendslop.

      A group of kid devs who wants to make something dumb to play with their friends are just as likely to create the next big thing as any AAA studio, right now. They can just fire up unity, unreal or godot and start placing assets and scripting, and maybe they'll find something that resonates with a lot of people looking for semi-collaborative experiences

      most obvious example: https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]

  • Fuck Sony with 3 phase AC.

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