Sony has recently shocked the videogame industry by indicating the possibility of not releasing any more of their single player based Playstation exclusives on the PC which means if you were waiting for Ghost of Yotei to come out on the PC sometimes in this year, there might be some bad news for you down the line. Same goes for Insomniac’s upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine that’s scheduled to release in September and no doubt there’s a lot of gamers waiting to play it on launch day but sadly, it seems that the only way to play those titles from now on would be to buy a PS5 instead.
Now a recent research (via GamesIndustry.Biz) has unveiled a huge reason for the shift in Sony’s catalogue of blockbuster AAA titles which states that many of the Playstation ports have only garnered a small part of their overall player share on the PC as opposed to their native platform.
“Newzoo’s data shows that PlayStation titles ported to PC after their console launch typically see PC account for around 13% of total players in the first three months across both releases,” says Manu Rosier, the Director of Market Intelligence at Newzoo.
“By comparison, when comparable AAA titles launch simultaneously on PC and console, PC contributes closer to 44% of players in the same period.”
Another huge reason that’s been outlined in the research is the timings of the Playstation ports on the PC where games like Spider-Man 2 that came out over a year after it originally released on the PS5, a significant share of the player base has already moved on which is quite expected as the excitement is sure to drain away with the hefty amount of additional time.
“The key takeaway is that release timing has a significant impact on PC engagement. When a PC version arrives years after the console launch, much of the early lifecycle demand has already been captured on the primary platform,” said Rosier.
However, another big reason for the lower player share also lies with the quality of those ports, for example, Spider-Man 2 was one of the biggest hits on the PS5 but it’s PC port which came out last year had a cavalcade of bugs and all sorts of technical problems which resulted in the game having weird visual glitches (even on sufficiently high end PCs) and poor performance across a wide range of GPU and CPUs.
And to top it all off, developer Nixxes didn’t bother to iron out all the issues and the port stopped receiving patches altogether after a few months with a lot of the problems still remaining in the game. So the poorly optimized port (at least in the case of Spider-Man 2) is a major reason why the game didn’t became a hit on the PC, and that needs to be considered as well.
Sony is yet to announce this officially so there may still be hope for their lineup of 2026 to find their way on the PC at least. Although both Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Kena: Scars of Kosmora are reportedly safe cause they were already confirmed to release on the PC platform.
