As Sony reportedly pulls back from bringing its new major single-player PlayStation titles to PC, former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida suggests the company’s thinking has reverted back to the “older days.”
Earlier this year, it was reported that PlayStation’s studio business group CEO Hermen Hulst had told staff that Sony’s narrative single-player games (like Saros and Ghost of Yotei, for example) would be PlayStation console exclusive going forward. Speaking in a new episode of The Verge’s Vergecast (below), Yoshida, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment worldwide studios, gives his thoughts on this apparent decision, which comes despite how some PS5 titles have “sold really well” on the platform and how “easy it is to port” them in the first place.
He explains that when he was at the company during the PS4 generation, “Sony didn’t choose to release AAA games, first-party games on PC because they thought making it really PlayStation exclusive was important to appeal to console gamers.”
Then, during the PS5 era, when some online games arrived on PC at the same time as they did on Sony’s console (like Helldivers 2), but big single-player games instead had a tendency of showing up a while after their initial launch (like Horizon Forbidden West and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2), the company seemed to be appealing to everyone in one way or another. Creating timed console exclusivity threw a bone to those PS5 users who care about getting their hands on games first, and PC players would eventually be rewarded for their patience, too.
“They felt that would be good enough to appeal to PlayStation users, but at the same time, by releasing first-party games [and] IP to PCs and [reaching] new users potentially… those users playing first-party games on PC might become a fan of that IP, [and] might in the future come to PlayStation,” Yoshida says. “That kind of thinking I think they had.”
Now though, Yoshida suggests Sony’s thinking has reverted back to what it was in the “older days,” with the company leaning more into the idea of pushing its platform with exclusives rather than simply trying to get its first-party games in the hands of as many fans as it can. Acknowledging he doesn’t know for sure since he’s no longer at the company, he suggests: “Probably, that first-party business versus platform business… now, platform business side is kind of winning the argument, I guess. Platform side always [wants] something exclusive, right?”
It’s not surprising to hear Yoshida suggest the apparent move is a bit old-school – the former lead previously said that porting games to PC is “almost like printing money.” It seems strange to leave all that behind, but then again, it’s definitely more incentive for those without a PlayStation console to buy one.