Sony plans to expand significantly into PC gaming, according to an investor briefing published this week. By 2025, Sony says, roughly a third of the games in PlayStation’s portfolio will come out on PC.
PlayStation’s first-party portfolio comprises a number of top-flight series from prestigious developers, including Insomniac’s Ratchet & Clank, Santa Monica Studio’s God of War, and Naughty Dog’s Uncharted and The Last of Us. Traditionally, PlayStation games have remained exclusive to PlayStation, but over the past few years, Sony has started to port them over to PC:
- In July 2020, Sony released the genre-bending Death Stranding on PC, where it runs tremendously well.
- Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerrilla’s open-world game about staring directly at a pretty sunset and immediately wishing you had sunglasses on, hit PC the following month, confirming a Kotaku report from earlier that year. It launched with some notable performance issues.
- Zombie horde simulator Days Gone came to PC in May 2021.
- Sony put God of War on PC in January 2022. Everyone loves it.
- Later this year, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves, a remastered version of two Uncharted games that are already pretty freakin’ mastered if you ask me, will come to PC. It’s currently only out on PlayStation 5.
From a player’s perspective, Sony’s continued foray into PC undeniably rules. And considering that it’s still tough AF to get your hands on a PS5, even as we approach the point in this console generation where developers leave the PlayStation 4 behind, PC versions will help more games reach more people.
But the choice to release games on PC also benefits Sony from a financial perspective. Horizon’s port helped propel the game’s total sales across an impressive benchmark: To date, it’s sold more than 20 million copies. And it’s not just Horizon that brings in a ton of money. In the investor brief, Sony estimates that its PC portfolio is on track to earn $300 million in revenue during the company’s 2022 fiscal year—more than triple the revenue from the same segment for its 2021 fiscal year, and close to 10 times the segment revenue from its 2020 fiscal year. Clearly, PC players like entertaining games with luxurious production values. What a surprise!
Sony hasn’t revealed any details about which games are next due to make the leap to PC. (Representatives for Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Data-miners suggest that the PS5-exclusive roguelike Returnal is next at bat for a PC port. (Returnal was among the games named in the massive Nvidia data leak, which was correct about the existence of Kingdom Hearts 4.) Earlier this year, Sony published Horizon Forbidden West, a sequel to Zero Dawn, on PS4 and PS5. It’s safe to assume that this game will come to PC…eventually. Probably.