PlayStation Studios CEO Reportedly Halts Future Single-Player PC Ports
This is something of a pity for PC players, since the platform often got the best versions of these games with highly optimized and feature-rich PC ports, but it makes sense in the context of hotter competition from machines like ROG Xbox Ally X and the upcoming Steam Machine ahead of PlayStation 6. Project Helix's hybrid console-PC nature likely also rang alarm bells for Sony, since it could mean that effectively any PC port would run on the consoles of its direct rivals.
Top: Ghost of Yotei, which has remained PlayStation exclusive.
Another theory is that Sony is halting the initiative due to poor PC sales of its games, though Sony's own timed-exclusivity practices, of delaying ports by a year or more for the majority of titles that made the leap, couldn't have helped on that front. Some of Sony's PC releases, including Helldivers 2 (over 13 million copies) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (over 5 million copies) have done very well, but more recent titles like Horizon: Fobidden West and God of War: Ragnarok have struggled to even make the one-million mark.
Whether the reasoning is due to potentially feeding competitors or diminishing returns from a delayed PC release, it would seem that PlayStation has made up its mind, at least assuming that Schreier's information is accurate. It may prove to be a wise decision, since Xbox seems likely to return to the traditional model of selling its consoles with exclusives. Sadly, it seems that the brief era of unity between console and PC has ended, at least for single-player titles.
It seems Death Stranding 2 marked the death of single-player PlayStation-to-PC ports.
At the very least, this move from PlayStation does reflect that it's taking the likes of Xbox and Steam as rival platforms deadly seriously. Multiplayer games are still expected to flow from PlayStation to PC, and we wouldn't be surprised to see both multi and single-player games go from Xbox to PC due to Microsoft's investment in both ecosystems. Multiplayer games continuing to spread between platforms does still break from Nintendo's fully traditionalist approach to console exclusivity (no Nintendo games unless you're on a Nintendo system), but the mentality that gave us "everything is an Xbox" is clearly dying out.
