Although PC ports have done quite well for the company in recent years, Sony's reportedly decided to pull back on their frequency, at least for big single-player games. To what end is unclear – there weren't all that many to start with – but a former higher-up from the corporation doesn't see the logic here, because the games were finding players they would never have otherwise.
On the PSI podcast (via VGC), Shawn Layden, former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, explains he can't quite wrap his head around Sony seemingly pushing away the PC audience.
"First of all, the games don't go on PC for like a year or whatever it is," he says. "It's not day and date, and if they think that a game coming out 18 months after its launch on another platform somehow stopped a sale from happening 18 months ago in the hardware business, I would like to see how they can prove that thesis."
A year and a half is actually on the lower side. Some of the ports we've seen on PC, such as Marvel's Spider-Man, Ghost of Tsushima, and God of War, took years to move away from PS4 and PS5 and onto the likes of Steam and the Epic Games Store.
As Layden points out, on that timescale, it's probably safe to assume those fans weren't going to be buying the base console. "If someone's waiting 18 months for something to come on PC, we didn't lose a sale to them," he says, emphatically. "They weren't going to buy the hardware anyway."
He believes the development cost for these versions was likely the largest contributing factor to Sony's reported pivot, and he points out he didn't push the business in this direction to make money. It's about making PlayStation-associated franchises available to greater amounts of people.
"The PC thing, in my mind anyway at the time, was not to make money, frankly, it was how do I get my intellectual property in front of people who wouldn’t normally see it?" he says.
"How do I get the world of Horizon to be seen by people who aren't in the PlayStation world?" he adds. "Not necessarily because they're going to buy a PlayStation, I wasn't that crazy. I didn't think that was going to happen."
It's a fair argument, and now that the Steam Machine exists, you have to wonder whether Sony's cutting off its nose to spite its face here. Alas, this is the reality at present, but we'll see what the future holds.
