PlayStation's once ambitious plans for PC seem to have softened considerably in recent months with reports suggesting Sony is moving away from porting first-party games to PC as it has done with The Last of Us, Uncharted, God of War, and more. In another shift toward console exclusivity, Sony Interactive Entertainment is now pulling the PlayStation Plus app from PC due to a low user rate. The app will no longer be available to PlayStation Plus users on PC starting December 10.
"PlayStation believes in providing high-quality experiences to our players, and we regularly review offerings to ensure we are focusing on experiences our members value most," SIE senior director of content acquisitions and operations Adam Michel says at the bottom of a PlayStation Blog announcing the latest PS Plus additions. Michel says "a very small number of eligible PlayStation Plus Premium members (less than 0.4%)" are using the PC app. "Making this change allows us to focus on enhancing high-quality experiences that more of our members want to use."
Back in May, Bloomberg reported that PlayStation's studio business group CEO Hermen Hulst had informed staff that Sony's big-budget story-driven games would no longer come to PC and instead be PlayStation console exclusives going forward. And in September, former SIE worldwide studios president Shuhei Yoshida suggested Sony could be reverting to its "older ways" of focusing on the "platform business" instead of trying to get its first-party games into as many hands as possible.
Sony itself has yet to publicly acknowledge its apparent trend away from the PC side of its games business, but just looking at how much PC ports of PlayStation games have slowed down in recent months and years, it does seem clear there's been something of a shift in focus. What that means for the next generation of PlayStation games and consoles is unclear, but another one of the company's former leaders thinks "true innovation" means a $300 PS6.
