PlayStation says Windows PC is not a "major risk," probably because blanket 'day and date' PlayStation game launches on PC are coming sooner than...

[Windows Central]

Are you ready for the latest strategies Sony and Xbox are or will be pushing?

PlayStation says Windows PC is not a "major risk," probably because blanket 'day and date' PlayStation game launches on PC are coming sooner than... : Read more

 

[fatpunkslim]

What some media and players seem to ignore is that PlayStation has fewer and fewer exclusive games, whether first-party or third-party. In fact, the situation with first-party games is quite catastrophic as there is really not much besides remasters. We can cite some games that were formerly exclusive to PlayStation and are now available on Xbox, for example:

• Crash Bandicoot
• Spyro
• Death Stranding (the sequel will follow the same path even faster)
• Persona 3 Reload
• Sifu
• Kena
• Forspoken
• Metal Gear Solid HD Collection
• Final Fantasy VII
• Kingdom Hearts
• MLB The Show
• Nioh
• etc...

On the Xbox side, most of the licenses were already multiplatform before their acquisition, but 99% of the historical and new licenses have remained exclusive. Xbox factually has more exclusive games than PlayStation currently, and 2025 will further accentuate this fact. Xbox releases more multiplatform games than PlayStation simply because Xbox has three times more studios and three times more licenses, but it also has more exclusive games for the same reasons.

Xbox will continue its hybrid strategy with fully exclusive games, temporarily exclusive games, and multiplatform games.

The problem with PlayStation is that they create very few first-party games and mostly have temporary exclusives with third-party publishers. Third-party publishers are less and less willing to dedicate their games to a single console, except for very small studios, so PlayStation has fewer and fewer exclusive games mechanically and has to spend increasingly large sums for fewer exclusive games in the end.

They are forced to turn to the PC for obvious profitability reasons, but if they took so long, it's because they know very well that their exclusivity strategy is very fragile, simply because they do not control third-party publishers and it is increasingly difficult to maintain long-term contracts. Just look at Square Enix distancing itself from PlayStation, or Kojima who bought back the Death Stranding license to have free hands.

So in fact, the situation of PlayStation releasing its games day one on PC is more precarious than it seems, and these facade declarations will not change anything. PS5 sales are worse than PS4, and 50% of PS4 players have not migrated to PS5. Conversely, the PC market is booming and will continue to do so, especially with the release of day one games on PC.

 

[Wolfinston85]

It'll make sense to see more Sony titles coming to PC day 1, will be pleasantly surprised if we hear Wolverine getting a day 1 release for PC, but it's still something I don't necessarily see as a real possibility.

Fact is, there's a lot of developers and publishers out there that are noticing the writing on the wall with how games are being made and consumed nowadays... there are less and less people finishing their titles, and there are more and more games being made; heck, just next month alone, we're getting: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Rift of the Necrodancer, Sniper Elite Resistance, Civ VII, AC Shadows, Avowed, and freaking Like a Dragon a Pirate Yacuzzi in Hawai.

There are simply too many games coming out for people to worry about some exclusives, no matter how good these are, or how much do people like them. I love GTA, but I'm not getting a freaking console for six -I prefer to wait the year, upgrade the PC, and eventually play it in my platform of choice-, same with Ghost of Yotei; loved Ghost of Tsushima finally coming out last year... but I am not gonna pay to buy a PS5, just to get Ghost of freaking Yotei... It seems as if Sony is also using a lot of its PC releases as a way to promote their future projects: Ghost of Tsushima gets released last year given its sequel will get released this year. Now TLOU2 is releasing this year -hopefully a good port-, given the second season of the show will also release around spring... this type of strategy seems a bit silly to me.

Eventually Sony will have to make the leap the same way Microsoft has done it, they're simply leaving too much money out of the table for them to keep this periodic game releases going; my guess is that they'll "test the waters" by releasing one of their big games to PC (such as Wolverine) and see how the game fares in sales and reaction from the players... it'll be fun watching fanboys having a meltdown; but for the industry at hand, and the vast majority of players; I think it'll be a welcome change to get a game like that day 1 with more to come after the sales increase significantly for Sony first party releases.

 

[fjtorres5591]

Sony is 100% correct that PC is not a threat to their installed base: anybody who has been gaming on Playstation for a few (5?) years is locked in by their pass investment and (for now) pre-built gaming PCs are significantly more expensive than consoles.

Consoles are entry level living room gaming boxes and between their plug and play features, low cost, and sunk library lock-in, Sony can count on 100M or so gamers to buy their wares. As long as Sony delivers a few high profile exclusives and access to the bulk of third party releases they can count on a steady revenue stream to support the rest of the company. (movies don't do too hot, for one.)

However, that value proposition is not guaranteed to last much longer.

Sony faces a confluence of trends and competitors that have been eating away at their PlayStation net profit margins. As 2024 they were running in the 6% range down from 9% in 2023. (MS as a whole runs at 45%, ABK 25%. Most game publishers run in the 15-25%range.) In a vacuum, 6% is not catastrophic (supermarkets run in the 4-5% range and consider themselves lucky; retailers. as a whole are closer to 9%) but underperforming your sector by 3-4X isn't sustainable.

Today, PlayStation is something of a Potemkin brand; all appearances and stunts, masking fundamental weakness and a weak market position. For all that Sony harps on their exclusives, 67% of their gross revenues comes from multiplatform games and 16% from their subscriptions leaving 16% for first party games, whether console only or multiplatform. (Don't forget MLB: THE SHOW runs on XBOX and Game Pass console and PC.)

So yes, Sony has a lock on their installed base but it isn't growing.
They aren't bringing in gamers locked into XBOX or Nintendo and the high end gamers on PC are more likely to go to XBOX (PLAY ANYWHERE!!) if they go "slumming" in the low end.

Sony isn't binging their games to PC out of kindness but of desperation; they need the revenues. And that need is why the PS5 PRO exists; that $800-1000 price is no accident. Most (non-Nintendo) consoles are subsidized by anything from $50-150, maybe more at launch, to secure revenues from game sales, but a mid-gen box like the PS5 Pro doesn't grow the install base (PS4 Pro and XB1X didn't) but instead serve to extract extra revenue from the faithful. So odds are the Pro isn't subsidized but is instead priced with a modest profit baked it.

The biggest danger to Sony in 2025 is no longer XBOX or even Nintendo. The imminent threat is STEAMOS and rebootable handheld PCs. How big a threat we'll see next week. Because Sony needs PC game sales to grow their revenues and fund the next wave of game they develop or payhat but those very sales on STEAM added to PC-only games and XBOX Plays Anywhere pretty much neuters the PlayStation value proposition to anybody not already locked-in to their platform.

Their installed base is the sum total of the addressable market for their games. No growth to be expected unless they change their business model the way XBOX is changing.

No, PC is no threat.
But STEAM is and they can't block it.
But they can't admit it because they need Steam to sell their games.
Lose-lose.

 

[fjtorres5591]

It'll make sense to see more Sony titles coming to PC day 1, will be pleasantly surprised if we hear Wolverine getting a day 1 release for PC, but it's still something I don't necessarily see as a real possibility.

Fact is, there's a lot of developers and publishers out there that are noticing the writing on the wall with how games are being made and consumed nowadays... there are less and less people finishing their titles, and there are more and more games being made; heck, just next month alone, we're getting: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Rift of the Necrodancer, Sniper Elite Resistance, Civ VII, AC Shadows, Avowed, and freaking Like a Dragon a Pirate Yacuzzi in Hawai.

There are simply too many games coming out for people to worry about some exclusives, no matter how good these are, or how much do people like them. I love GTA, but I'm not getting a freaking console for six -I prefer to wait the year, upgrade the PC, and eventually play it in my platform of choice-, same with Ghost of Yotei; loved Ghost of Tsushima finally coming out last year... but I am not gonna pay to buy a PS5, just to get Ghost of freaking Yotei... It seems as if Sony is also using a lot of its PC releases as a way to promote their future projects: Ghost of Tsushima gets released last year given its sequel will get released this year. Now TLOU2 is releasing this year -hopefully a good port-, given the second season of the show will also release around spring... this type of strategy seems a bit silly to me.

Eventually Sony will have to make the leap the same way Microsoft has done it, they're simply leaving too much money out of the table for them to keep this periodic game releases going; my guess is that they'll "test the waters" by releasing one of their big games to PC (such as Wolverine) and see how the game fares in sales and reaction from the players... it'll be fun watching fanboys having a meltdown; but for the industry at hand, and the vast majority of players; I think it'll be a welcome change to get a game like that day 1 with more to come after the sales increase significantly for Sony first party releases.

The consumption part is the underwater part of the iceberg.

Not only do third party games dominate PlayStation, but the lion's share of the playtime is going to live service games. That doesn't leave much room for exclusives, even acclaimed titles like SPIDER-MAN 2 and ASTROBOT. Or, ahem, FINAL FANTASY.

And if FINAL FANTASY sales disappointed Square-Enix despite the Sony exclusivity payout, how disappointed might Sony be?

Odds are there won't be more third party exclusives on any platform moving forward.

As to Wolverine or whatever sacrificial lamb is their first day and date PC release, they'll have to see what it does to their boxes. After all, an unknown number of PC gamers keep a console around for exclusives. If the PS exclusives come to PC, which version is the better buy?

 

[Lurking_Lurker_Lurks]

The worst of the gaming industry is its hubris. There were so many poor decisions made early on (like how marketing for video games alienated entire audiences who still struggle to find a place in the entertainment medium) and decades later the industry isn't really learning from its mistakes.

Everything has to be Playstation vs Xbox vs Nintendo, but what about Playstation vs Playstation? Total hardware sales have started at 100m (PS1), peaked at 150-160m, dropped way down to 80m, and "dominated" last gen at 117m (with a longer product lifecycle). Even if every single Xbox One user "upgraded" to a PS5, total hardware sales would still likely stay under 200m over the course of 8 years. That's not good. There also is the Xbox hardware decline. Xbox is making their software more available, and as a result Xbox sales have been staying flat as well and decreasing year over year. That's also not good and they both say the same thing. Consoles haven't really taken off.

A product needs to be seen as a good product on its own to be sustainable. It also needs baseline software support, but all three consoles are past that. Xbox has more third party support than ever. Consoles should be able to stand on their own at this point and they should compete in terms of value and features. People need to WANT an Xbox or PlayStation and that can't just be tied to exclusive software. That's not a sustainable model as we are seeing. Games cost more than ever to make and console exclusivity is cutting potential customers into fractions. In 2025 we really shouldn't even be discussing console exclusives as a necessity and consoles themselves shouldn't be as niche as they are. Nintendo is both selling a unique gaming product and controlling their costs. They haven't massively taken off either, but they're performing well for the market and again don't have as high costs to deal with. Xbox has massively grown into this gaming entity beyond just consoles and is likely going to continue. Playstation has left themselves stuck in the mud and dragging their feet to get unstuck. The PS5 is not that different from a PC and the pro really screams that with its pricing. At the same time there's less exclusives than ever with third parties embracing multiplatform releases, and it just being incredibly costly to do first party blockbuster exclusives. Even then they are still slowly releasing on PC and everyone knows it'll all come to PC eventually. Both Xbox and PlayStation need to figure out how to do what still hasn't been done and make console hardware truly mainstream, but Playstation specifically needs to figure out their software and what they want to do as a publisher.

 

[Lurking_Lurker_Lurks]

What some media and players seem to ignore is that PlayStation has fewer and fewer exclusive games, whether first-party or third-party. In fact, the situation with first-party games is quite catastrophic as there is really not much besides remasters. We can cite some games that were formerly exclusive to PlayStation and are now available on Xbox, for example:

• Crash Bandicoot
• Spyro
• Death Stranding (the sequel will follow the same path even faster)
• Persona 3 Reload
• Sifu
• Kena
• Forspoken
• Metal Gear Solid HD Collection
• Final Fantasy VII
• Kingdom Hearts
• MLB The Show
• Nioh
• etc...

On the Xbox side, most of the licenses were already multiplatform before their acquisition, but 99% of the historical and new licenses have remained exclusive. Xbox factually has more exclusive games than PlayStation currently, and 2025 will further accentuate this fact. Xbox releases more multiplatform games than PlayStation simply because Xbox has three times more studios and three times more licenses, but it also has more exclusive games for the same reasons.

Xbox will continue its hybrid strategy with fully exclusive games, temporarily exclusive games, and multiplatform games.

The problem with PlayStation is that they create very few first-party games and mostly have temporary exclusives with third-party publishers. Third-party publishers are less and less willing to dedicate their games to a single console, except for very small studios, so PlayStation has fewer and fewer exclusive games mechanically and has to spend increasingly large sums for fewer exclusive games in the end.

They are forced to turn to the PC for obvious profitability reasons, but if they took so long, it's because they know very well that their exclusivity strategy is very fragile, simply because they do not control third-party publishers and it is increasingly difficult to maintain long-term contracts. Just look at Square Enix distancing itself from PlayStation, or Kojima who bought back the Death Stranding license to have free hands.

So in fact, the situation of PlayStation releasing its games day one on PC is more precarious than it seems, and these facade declarations will not change anything. PS5 sales are worse than PS4, and 50% of PS4 players have not migrated to PS5. Conversely, the PC market is booming and will continue to do so, especially with the release of day one games on PC.

1) Nioh and Forspoken aren't on Xbox (unless you mean PC? Though only Forspoken is on the MS store/Xbox app)

2) This reality is really slept on. In a time where the entire industry was downsizing, Xbox came in and massively grew. Yes, largely due to purchases thanks to daddy Microsoft, but also Microsoft themselves were downsizing a lot at the time and they still made those purchases. Xbox took good advantage of the time and future proofed themselves beyond the stagnating console. Yes, we're seeing more now Xbox first party titles on PS, but their output as a publisher in general is insane. It also can't be denied how many of those games dominate charts on other platforms. Xbox is releasing more games than they ever had before. In comparison Playstation first party releases have really slowed down. They heavily relied on third party exclusives this gen and now those partners are very vocally saying that strategy isn't financially sound for them anymore.