It’s really no wonder Sony’s backing away from bringing its single player games to PC.
We’ve felt for a while that the novelty of the platform holder’s ports has been wearing thin, but now we have Ampere estimates to back up that theory. And, honestly, they’re not particularly pretty.
The Game Business published the following launch month sales data for a number of Sony first-party games, and it all makes for eye-opening reading:
So, Sucker Punch’s open world did fairly well, then, but the other three sequels listed performed poorly. The Game Business points out that God of War Ragnarok had 6.9 million players on PS5 and PS4 at launch, so that 300k is a drop in the ocean.
Of course, the counterpoint to this would be that it took almost two years for the title to be ported to Steam, but therein lies the dilemma.
Sony is not stupid and will know that it could increase the sales of these PC ports if it launched them day-and-date with PS5, but the company is in the business of selling consoles and that kind of approach would have a profound impact on its tried and trusted business model.
And so that brings us to the present day, where word is the firm has pulled the plug on ports of its major single player games. (It’ll still publish live service games and select externally developed titles on PC.)
To be honest, looking at these numbers, its decision doesn’t really surprise us. Is there really all that much value in an extra 300k sales of God of War Ragnarok when it’s sold millions of copies on PlayStation?
Sony is yet to comment on its decision to slowly pare back its PC ports, but the reporting on this is rock solid – and ultimately its actions over the coming months are going to lay bare its position either way.
