For a few years, Sony tried something different. Instead of keeping its biggest games locked to PlayStation hardware, it started bringing them to PC, with The Last of Us, God of War, and Horizon all making the jump.
The idea was ambitious: get half of Sony’s games onto PC and mobile by 2025. That plan is now quietly dying.
According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Sony has shelved a planned PC port of Ghost of Yōtei, the follow-up to Ghost of Tsushima. The upcoming action game Saros will also stay PS5-exclusive.
Sony is pulling back from the PC market for its single-player titles and returning to the old playbook of using exclusives to sell consoles.
The PC ports, it turns out, didn’t move the needle the way Sony hoped. Part of the problem was self-inflicted, as Sony never committed to releasing its games on PC at the same time as PlayStation.
Games would trickle onto PC months or even years after their console debut, which made it hard to build a reliable audience on the platform.
When your release schedule is that unpredictable, PC players don’t know when or whether to wait. Some just buy a PS5. Others move on.
The company will still release some games on PC, but the logic has shifted. Online multiplayer titles like Marathon, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls and Horizon: Hunter’s Gathering are still coming to PC, presumably because a larger player pool makes those games better.
Single-player games that were already deep in development for PC, like Death Stranding 2 and Kena: Scars of Kosmora are still on track. But beyond those, the pipeline appears empty.
There’s another factor that reportedly shook things up inside Sony. Microsoft’s next Xbox is rumored to be less of a traditional console and more of a gaming PC, one that could support multiple storefronts.
The implication is that PlayStation games sold on PC could theoretically end up running on Xbox-branded hardware. Sony executives were reportedly not happy about that possibility. It’s one thing to sell your games on Steam. It’s another to essentially feed content to a competitor’s device.
The move puts Sony back in line with how Nintendo has always operated: build great exclusive software, and people will buy your hardware to play it.
It’s a strategy that has worked consistently for Nintendo, even without any presence on PC or other platforms. Sony is betting the same logic applies to PlayStation.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has gone the opposite direction. Xbox games are on PC, on Game Pass, and increasingly on PlayStation and Nintendo platforms too.
That aggressive multiplatform push has blurred what Xbox actually is as a brand, and it’s become harder to make the case for owning an Xbox when the games are everywhere anyway.
Sony appears to be watching that unfold and deciding it doesn’t want the same problem.
The casualty that hasn’t been addressed yet is Nixxes Software, the Sony-owned studio whose entire job is making PC ports of PlayStation games. What happens to them now is an open question.
Sony recently shut down Bluepoint Games, the studio behind the Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes, so the company has shown it’s willing to close studios when their role no longer fits the strategy. Nixxes may be in an uncomfortable position.
Sony hasn’t made any official statement. Schreier’s sources noted that plans could still change. That said, PlayStation appears to be betting that exclusivity still means something and that the way to sell hardware is to make people feel like they’re missing out.
