Recent rumors indicating that Sony will make an official announcement about ending its trend of bringing single-player PlayStation Studios titles to PC might be enough to make one wonder just how much money the company made with its ports of games like God of War Ragnarök or Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. While far from an official confirmation, a former employee’s LinkedIn profile may provide some answers.
Former PC Planner and Insights Manager at PlayStation, Jerry Liu, who worked at the company between January 2021 and June 2023, has noted that his work at Sony helped the unit “grow from $0-300M in net revenue” over the span of three years.
To achieve this, his responsibilities included optimizing promotional strategies and forecasting budgets for PlayStation’s PC portfolio, providing insight and business cases to try and convince leadership to “pursue more aggressive pricing” strategies, analyzing the PlayStation back catalog, and developing forecast models and sales targets. Interestingly, he noted that his strategies for aggressive pricing led to an increase in gross revenue from PC releases by 25 percent.
Last month, a report had indicated that Sony was originally going to bring its recent and upcoming single-player titles—namely, last year’s Ghost of Yōtei and the upcoming Saros—to PC. However, the company has seemingly decided against this and has cancelled work on any ports that were in progress. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, those “familiar with the company’s plans” said that a “faction within PlayStation” was unsure about porting its first-party games over to PC to begin with.
A major reason for this was apparently the belief that it would harm the sales of PlayStation hardware in the long term. While PS5 sales would also be affected, subsequent console releases might have also started facing trouble, as well as the brand as a whole.
In a more recent forum post, Schreier had said that Sony was going to make its plans to stop releasing single-player games on PC official “at some point.” It is unknown, however, when this will be, and could range from a simple social media post to a comment to its investors during an earnings call.
Despite these plans, however, Sony wants to continue bringing multiplayer titles to PC alongside their PS5 releases. The immense success of Helldivers 2 likely had a role to play in this, and upcoming games like Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls and Horizon Hunters Gathering are already confirmed for PC releases. This move makes sense, since cross-platform multiplayer on these titles also ends up ensuring that PS5 players won’t have to worry about low player counts with PC players bolstering the game.
This also means that Death Stranding 2: On the Beach might very well be the last single-player PlayStation game to come out on PC. However, it is worth noting that Kojima Productions isn’t a first-party developer under PlayStation Studios. Sony simply published the game, and likely has little say on whether or not the studio brings its games to more platforms. A report from last week has indicated that its PC launch was quite successful too, with more than 2 million sales since release.
