Sony is shifting away from releasing certain PS5 exclusives on PC, as it apparently scraps a planned port of Ghost Of Yōtei.
While Sony hasn’t gone down the multiplatform route to the same extreme as Microsoft’s Xbox, it has set an expectation over recent years that most PlayStation 5 exclusive games will eventually end up on PC.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Returnal, God Of War Ragnarök and several others have all made their way to PC over recent years. Just recently, it announced Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is also making the jump, on March 19 this year.
However, as rumoured last week, it seems like Sony is planning to stop PC ports of single-player PlayStation 5 games altogether, as the company shifts its strategy back to exclusives.
According to a Bloomberg report, Sony no longer plans to release major PlayStation games on PC moving forward. This doesn’t include online multiplayer titles such as Marathon and Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, presumably to increase their available player-base, but it will apply to single-player experiences like Saros and Marvel’s Wolverine.
The report specifically states Sony ‘scrapped’ plans in ‘recent weeks’ to bring Ghost of Yōtei to PC, along with other unnamed internally developed titles. This is somewhat surprising considering its predecessor, Ghost Of Tsushima, launched on PC in 2024.
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This rule does not seem to apply to games like Death Stranding 2: On The Beach and Kena: Scars Of Kosmora, which while published by Sony, are made by external developers.
As for the reasons behind this shift, sales of PlayStation games on PC have dropped in recent years. According to estimates by Alinea Analytics from November, 2018’s God Of War on PC sold 2.5x more copies than God Of War Ragnarök, when you compare their launch windows. Similarly, Marvel’s Spider-Man sold over twice as many copies as its sequel.
Sony’s biggest hit on PC is Helldivers 2, with over 12.7 million copies sold, but the next highest is Horizon Zero Dawn at 4.5 million copies. None of the sequels however, for Horizon or otherwise, have managed to achieve these same numbers.
Sony began bringing games to PC in 2020, at the start of the PlayStation 5 generation, so this reversion suggests it is taking a stricter exclusive-led approach for the upcoming PlayStation 6. According to the Bloomberg report, there is concern within Sony that releasing games on PC ‘will hurt sales of the PlayStation 5 and its successors’.
There might be concern within Sony around Microsoft’s next Xbox too, which will apparently run Windows and be able to play PC games. As such, this backtrack might be to stop future PlayStation games from being compatible with the next Xbox.
Sony hasn’t officially commented on this shift, and there’s a chance they could pivot back down the line, but it’s certainly an interesting precursor to what could be a more rigid, exclusive-focused generation with the PlayStation 6 – one that will make the PlayStation 5 seem even more of an outlier amongst Sony’s stable of consoles.
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