Last week, Sony officially announced that God of War (2018) is coming to PC and better yet, the game will be releasing in January 2022, giving us a very short wait between announcement and release. While other PlayStation exclusives have had their PC versions developed in-house by first-party teams, God of War will be the first title to be outsourced.
While the PC versions of Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone were handled in-house by their respective developers, God of War will be the first PlayStation exclusive brought to PC by a support studio. Sony Santa Monica is overseeing the PC version's development, but the core development work is being handled by Jetpack Interactive.
Jetpack Interactive has offered support studio services to larger publishers for years, having worked on franchises like NBA Live and Dark Souls. The studio's list of publisher clients also includes big names, like Sony Interactive Entertainment, Amazon Game Studios, Bandai Namco and EA.
In the world of Triple A game development, it is common for large publishers to utilise third-party support studios to handle certain aspects of the project. In many cases, this means console versions of games are handled in-house, while the PC version is handled by a support studio. In some rare cases, this ends in disaster, as we saw with Batman Arkham Knight's initial PC release back in 2015, but those instances are few and far between.
Moving forward, we would expect to see some other flagship PlayStation PC ports to be handled in-house, as Sony recently acquired renowned PC port developer, Nixxes Software.
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KitGuru Says: This is common practise in game development, so it's not anything to be too concerned about. Hopefully by the time January comes around, God of War will have a smooth launch on PC.