Sony confirms ‘tentpole’ PS5 games won’t be coming to PC day-and-date

For the last couple of years, Sony has been slowly bringing more of its first-party PlayStation games to PC to improve sales. Since then, Sony has remained on a two-year cadence between the PlayStation release of new titles and the eventual PC version. While we had hoped that Sony may look to speed this process up a bit after the success of Helldivers 2, the company has confirmed that to not be the case. 

Sony Interactive Entertainment's new co-CEOs, Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino, headed a business presentation yesterday evening. During one segment, Hulst addressed PlayStation's multiplatform plans, confirming that the company hopes to draw PC gamers to the PlayStation platform by keeping its ‘tentpole' single-player titles exclusive to PlayStation for multiple years.

The idea here is that you will buy a game like Spider-Man on PC, then potentially pick up a PS5 to play the sequel, Spider-Man 2, without having to wait multiple years for it to come to PC. The problem with this is that PC gamers are a notoriously patient bunch. For instance, while Epic Games secured high-profile exclusives for its store, the vast majority of PC gamers prefer Steam, and will wait a year or two for new games to come to their platform of choice.

A good example of this is Kingdom Hearts. The entire franchise came to PC two years ago as an Epic Games Store exclusive, but the announcement that the games are coming to Steam earlier this month has been met with far more hype and attention than the initial PC ports on EGS.

PlayStation may have “high hopes” that PC gamers will spend an extra $500 on another gaming system to play new single-player games a little earlier, but many of them will balk at the idea. After all, that $500 could be spent on a far better and newer graphics card. On top of that, Steam gets thousands of new games every month, there isn't exactly a shortage of things to play on this platform. PC gamers will wait, they've shown it time and time again.

While single-player PlayStation games won't be coming to PC at a faster rate, the company's ‘live service' games, like Helldivers 2, will release day-and-date on PS5 and PC.

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KitGuru Says: I don't see this strategy working particularly well. In my eyes, all this does is placate console warriors who are obsessed with the ‘prestige' of their console of choice. If you are a PC gamer, just wait. The major PlayStation titles will land on PC eventually and if this strategy doesn't work out as intended, eventually Sony will shrink the gap between PlayStation releases and PC. 

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