Videogame oracle Jason Schreier has issued a dire portent: Sony might be gearing up to reverse its push onto PC of the past six years. In the latest episode of the Triple Click podcast, Schreier said that "the sense I'm getting is that [Sony is] backing away from putting their exclusive console stuff—like, traditional singleplayer stuff—on PC."
Schreier—whose games industry newshound credentials are hard to argue with—later followed up his podcast comments with a post on Resetera: "It's not speculation, but sometimes topics come up on the show before I'm quite ready to publish a story about them." As an added bonus, Digital Foundry's John Linneman made similar comments on one of that outlet's shows, remarking that "I actually have an inkling that [Sony is] pulling away from PC. Watch this space."
Schreier suggested his understanding is that Sony's "strategy is live-service games are coming to PC," but that we can, perhaps, kiss goodbye to the days when pretty much every Sony first-party console exclusive was all but guaranteed to make its way to our platform of choice. "We're seeing Wolverine coming in September—they just announced it's coming September 15. That's not gonna be on PC. That's gonna be on PlayStation 5 only."
One shouldn't be alarmist about this. Until Schreier's full report hits, all we have to go on concerning any pullback from PC by Sony is a few comments on podcasts. Nevertheless, Schreier and Linneman are reputable, and I'm willing to say there's no smoke without fire. With the next Xbox sounding distinctly PC-like (though, with recent leadership changes at Microsoft's gaming arms, it's anyone's guess as to what the future there looks like now), it would make a degree of sense for Sony to shy away from its hitherto reliable strategy of putting everything on PC eventually. It likely isn't keen on the notion of PlayStation games appearing on an Xbox, even if that Xbox is nothing like the consoles of yore.
Then again, a year ago ex-PlayStation Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida chuckled that putting PlayStation games on PC was "almost like printing money," which has led a few people to raise an eyebrow at the notion of Sony pulling back from PC. I'm not sure I buy that, though. Porting games to PC takes time and resources. If Sony thinks that time and those resources might be better put to use on an alternative strategy—or if it's gotten the notion that committing to PC unavoidably weakens its core console business—I could quite easily see it making a U-turn.
Regardless, I have to admit that I'm not all that broken up by the notion of Sony's first-party singleplayer stuff swerving PC. I've played a fair number of them now, and only ever come away thinking I'd had a nice but unmemorable time.
