Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida says he doesn't see any proof Sony is abandoning PC releases, but says day-one PC launches aren't a great idea, anyway.
Speaking in an interview at Powerhouse Museum's ALT. Games Festival (via Respawn First) Yoshida says, "When I was working on the game development side, first-party at PlayStation, from a strategy standpoint, we are [sic] not allowed to bring our AAA games to other platforms like PC."
The first major first-party PC release was Horizon: Zero Dawn in 2020 – which was released almost a year after Yoshida stepped down as president of SIE Worldwide Studios. He explains: "As the game development scale and investment became larger and larger, it makes sense for me that in [the] PS5 generation they started to move their big games to PC."
Yoshida continues: "Some vocal small number of consumers complain when they see the PlayStation first-party games are ported to PC, but I do not think that really affected adoption of PlayStation hardware like PS5 in any way.
"Releasing games on PC after a couple of years must have helped recoup the investment of these big budget games and help the team and company to reinvest that money into their new games."
However, Yoshida comments on the timing of these releases being a major factor. "If they were releasing new AAA games on day one on other platforms, I don't think that's a good strategy for a platform holder like PlayStation."
Recently, a rumor emerged that Sony is reportedly ending PC ports of single-player PlayStation games like Ghost of Yotei, something that Yoshida says he's seen no "proof of them changing the strategy" but notes that "if they are changing, it's going to be interesting how they are able to maintain the investment on the big-budget games on the first-party side going forward."
There's a bit of speculation that Sony's decision could be due to rumors that the next Xbox is set to be a PC-based device like a Steam Machine, and Microsoft being able to say 'you can play Uncharted on Project Helix' probably isn't a look that Sony is too keen on, especially considering how long it took it to pull the trigger on an Xbox release of Helldivers 2.
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