As Xbox moves to be multiplatform, PlayStation is dialing all in on PC
Feb. 28, 2024Opinion | But it’s coming at a cost that will hopefully make the future brighter
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Over the last few years, PlayStation has made a habit of bringing its big PS4 and PS5 exclusives to PC around a year after their initial console debut, so this renewed push shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The likes of Returnal, The Last of Us, Marvel’s Spider-Man, God of War, and Uncharted have all made the migration to PC in recent years, with the majority gaining a celebrated second wind. But it seems like that’s just the beginning ofSony’s plans for PC. Unlike Microsoft, however, it’s not being that forthcoming about how its plans around PC releases will change going forward.
PS meets PC
During Sony’s latest earnings report,chairman Hiroki Totoki statedthat originally “the first party title’s main purpose was to make the console popular” – aka the PS4, PS5, and so on. Now, though, Totoki states that this first-party content “can be grown with multiplatform”, and that’s something that the company is pursuing with “aggressive” force to ensure improved profit margin performance. While Xbox might be courting PlayStation and Nintendo gamers, Totoki makes it clear that ‘computers’ are the focus for PlayStation.
“Delivering the immersive, narrative-driven stories that PlayStation Studios is known for, at the quality bar that we aspire to, requires a re-evaluation of how we operate,” explains PlayStation Studios head, Hermen Hulst. “Delivering and sustaining social, online experiences – allowing PlayStation gamers to explore our worlds in different ways – as well as launching games on additional devices such as PC and Mobile, requires a different approach and different resources.”
Xbox bossPhil Spencersaid much the same in therecent Xbox Podcastwhere its first wave of plans for its multiplatform strategy were revealed. “I do have a fundamental belief that over the next 5 or 10 years, exclusive games, games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware, are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry,” he stated, and clearly this is key in the attempt to rectify the issues plaguing the industry today.
I say PlayStation hasn’t clearly outlined any changes to its PlayStation to PC strategy, but it has already made a start this year with Helldivers 2. The multiplayer shooter is the first PS5 console exclusive to also debut simultaneously on PC, and it’s had a phenomenal start. It only took24 hours for Helldivers 2 to become the biggest PlayStation Studios game launch on Steam, and it’ssince gone on to become the biggest Steam launch from a PlayStation or Xbox Studios. That’s overtaking the likes of Destiny 2, although that didn’t come to Steam until several years after its initial release, but also Starfield too, which also dropped as a simultaneous release between Xbox and PC.
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This feels like a strategy that PlayStation can run with going forward, mimicking some of Xbox’s strategy to bring smaller, social-focused experiences to PC to better bolster their player counts and re-investment potentials from the off. Helldivers 2 isn’t made by a PlayStation-owned studio, or a title that you could realistically argue would be a definitive system-seller, and yet the cross-platform appetite for Arrowhead Game Studios' shooter has been insatiable –to the point where almost too many people are playing for the servers to cope. There’s clearly an appetite here, not just for a really good multiplayer shooter, the type of which we’ve been lacking for a few years now, but for the kind of experiences Sony is good at highlighting to be available more widely.
It’s also made a play for the PC market by launching the PlayStation Portal at the tail end of last year, with its Remote Play handheld vying for a slice of the pie currently being gobbled up by the likes of Steam Deck,AsusROG Ally, and other portable PCs. The Portal itself won’t go head-to-head with those Windows / Linux-powered beasts, but it’s an interesting show of what PlayStation’s overall strategy could be for diversifying its previously so walled-garden approach to releases.
If multiplatform is the thing that will save our games industry, then Sony and PlayStation – and hopefully Nintendo too one day – need to fully embrace it with some haste. At least the small glimmer of a silver lining to all this turmoil could well be the death of the console wars, and the extreme territorialism that comes with it. We can but hope.
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