Sony was always the “exclusives” company. For the PS5 I believe they outsold the Xbox equivalent all most 2:1 but I think that is because more and more people have gaming PCs. I still can’t believe PS5 sold something like 90 million! I think Sony is fighting a losing battle now steam is pushing for agnostic hardware and I only see Sony continuing this business model with exclusives that will never come to PC. Right now they are doing the math to determine what it would take to get the average person to buy a new PlayStation vs how much they made from Sony pc sales. It’s going to get harder every year with less developers going totally exclusive and the component cost increased. I’m guessing they will use the same model for ps6. Sell the consoles based on excluses then wait a few years once the console sales dip and move them over to PC. Steam machine is a real wildcard here.
Sony was always the “exclusives” company
Cough cough nintendo cough cough
Cough Cough
Nintendo exclusivity is the entire reason Sony whom invented the compact disk for gaming
Is why we have Sony Gaming AT ALL
Yeah, I really hope these are just the death throes of a slowly crumbling market segment (walled garden consoles).
Not only has the Steam Deck already blown a small crack into the almost entirely propietary handheld market, so much so that there’s now even a (niche) market with a bunch of different devices competing, but I also wonder what happens once the Steam Machine and whatever is happening with the next Xbox.
I’d usually be the last to root for Microsoft, but if their next device is really something more akin to a PC, then I wish them the best. That said, anything shipping with Linux, e.g. Steam Machines would still be my preferred choice of course.
My console money is for the Steam Frame so nothing of value was lost. Most of their games can be watched through a let’s play series anyway.
Love to see them come to steam (all platforms) instead
Surely this won’t backfire. I’m happy I never bought a ps5 and now I know I won’t buy a ps6 out of principle.
When you can’t compete, you restrict.
I think the next naughty dog game will be on playstation. I’ll be sorry to miss it, but not enough to buy the console.
Sucks, I was excited for the eventual release of Wolverine for PC in a few years, but now i will literally never play it, and that is okay.
I skipped the switch 2 despite heavily using the switch 1 for many years, and i’m planning on skipping future iterations of playstations as well. PC has usurped consoles for me entirely.
Even couch gaming on linux is better than a console. I’m all set. The deck or it’s equivalents handles any handheld gaming I want to do and it’s trivial to stream locally if I don’t want to have a gaming computer near my tv.
Oh, and i’ve ditched microsoft controllers to. 3rd party quality is phenomenal nowadays and it’s not limited to any one brand. I have this flydigi and 8bitdo stuff that all feel amazing and are more reliable than microsoft’s own and are cheaper with more features. It’s so nice not being dependent on overpriced garbage!
Lol goodbye
Instead of “little money” they’re going for no money. Bold move.
Sony doesn’t even release that many games anymore. Games take half a decade plus to make and I’ve lost interest in Sony’s superhero movies with interactive elements
Yes, but see, it didn’t make all of the money.
It was Xbox. Their “You can play anything on the next xbox” made Sony pissed, and that’s ultimately why they scaled it back.
“Next X-Box.”
Imagine changing your business plans to react to the gas escaping from a bloated corpse.
Ah. This actually makes some sense of this decision. It seemed weird they would pivot so hard backwards, but yeah.
So, not defending them because it’s still a stupid choice, but their reasons were not because PC bad, but because Xbox announced their “Play PC games on the next Xbox”. Meaning Microsoft’s next console could play PS games now (if they bought the PC version). Sony doesn’t want their rival console to play their games, so they revoked it.
I still think it’s stupid, exclusives are stupid, but that’s the actual reason before many more people claim that sony hates PC players. (I mean they do, but not for the reason you think)
I think there must be other reasons. Death Stranding was released as PS exclusive but got an actual Xbox release some time after PC release. Also, Microsoft has also released many first party titles on PS5. Even the new Halo will be on PS5.
I don’t think DS is first party? I might be wrong. It came to Macs and iPhones too.
I think they just got the timed exclusive.
Except do we actually know how the Xbox/PC thing will work? Are we sure it will be able to run all games and isn’t just their plan to push game streaming?
Nothing concrete, but their stated goal is to play any pc game on it, similar to what steam did with the deck. That was enough to scare off sony
Yeah, if anything, this is Valve’s fault. They upturned the playing field and proved a new path.
Well if they hadn’t paved the roads then the bank robbers couldn’t have driven away so really it’s the road pavers fault.
“Fault” isn’t an attack here. No need for the weird analogy. I just think the Steam Deck is the inciting incident to a whole chain of events in the gaming industry.
You could use a different word that’s not an attack if you don’t want to attack. Like “reason” or “catalyst” or “schmoople”.
Don’t get bent just because people took your words at face value rather than what you actually meant.
I’m just clarifying.
does it matter? shouldn’t be giving money to these companies anyways. they don’t deserve it and will just screw you over again and again
I think there were rumors even before the Xbox announcement. People speculated it might be because of the Steam Machine, which could be considered a console.
But yeah, I feel that Xbox cemented the decision.
If that would be the case then they could have tried something funny like having their games running only on Linux.
Of course power users would be able to get it running on Windows, but that would likely discourage Xbox folks.
This would make sense if they hadn’t increased the price of their hardware twice in one year. To me it just looks like they started behaving like a monopolistic company (because they can, as xbox is in the shitter)
Neither the price increases or the fact that Microsoft is giving up on a pure console are Sony’s fault.
It’s still unfortunate that this is happening. PC is no longer neutral ground.
Had the dumbshit U.S. president not shit out a bunch of tariffs along with every AI company buying up future stock of computer parts, I really don’t think Sony would have increased the price of these consoles.
They know it’s a bad look to do so. Microsoft also had to raise prices on their consoles last year.
Haven’t the slop companies not even actually bought anything yet? My understanding is that no money’s actually changed hands, and that all of this is happening because they pinky promised to buy components in the future with money they don’t even have right now. Which, yes, is basically how buying on credit works, but for everyone else that usually first requires having a reputation for being able to actually pay eventually, rather than the bubble imploding and all these companies going under before the order is even fulfilled.
Good. Should never have wasted the time doing it to begin with.
yeah!!! i’m so mad that more people are able to play these cool games! they should have never tried to have a bigger audience smh
They are a console manufacturer, a platform holder. It makes absolutely no sense to put your proprietary IPS on other platforms when you’re trying to sell your platform and system. It’s the entire reason that Nintendo still exists. Look at Microsoft, how many more nails in that coffin can possibly be put in it.
Not if there is no impact on your console platform if a given market segment would never spend money on your platform in the first place.
I bought Death Stranding and Heavy Rain on PC, I would not buy a Playstation just to play those 2 games.
It’s their call of course, I think the era of consoles as a siloed platform is slowly coming to an end.
I don’t think so at all. PlayStation and Nintendo want to sell hardware where as Microsoft does not care anymore because they can’t.
Hey Sony, I am never gonna buy a PlayStation, but I will buy anything almost anything from Kojima Productions at full price for PC.
My PS5 is just a Warframe box for the living room when I don’t feel like using my Deck, and I plan to essentially replace it with a Steam Machine down the road (sure I could just set up my own linux box there but the form factor is a huge motivator).
I think I use the thing for other games like once every few years. Death Stranding 2 is the only one I bought that comes to mind, Yotei was a gift. This isn’t going to encourage me to buy more of their games because this console is going in the closet soon enough.
i like your style, freak
Regardless this is a dumb decision. I guarantee they were raking in free cash from the ports. If this is a move to try to move more hardware, they’re sorely mistaken if they think I’m just gonna go buy a PS5 or even the upcoming PS6 over this
I don’t think their intent is to have you go buy a PS5, I think their bigger intent is preventing it on Xbox hardware.
I think Xbox’s claims that all PC games will be available on the new system is a big reason for them to not allow it on PC, they have been a firm “We don’t want this on Xbox”, and they can’t uphold that with Project Helix’s claims that it runs PC games.
I imagine that while that maybe was involved in their reasoning, that they are more worried about steam deck. Xbox is circling the drain. Steam deck is gaining steam. Ahem.
Their model is based on subscription to use online features. That becomes a harder sell when the hardware is also much more expensive. So, they will want to make gamers miss out by not having a PlayStation, similar to past console battles. However, in the past people picked a side and stuck with it. A gen or two ago, many gamers had more than one console or a console and a gaming able PC. I think that’s going to shrink with the cost rises.
They want people to choose PlayStation as their first choice. I don’t think people will, so it might mean they lose on both, so it’s a gamble. However, they can port to PC at any time, so I expect that’s what they will do.
It’s because the next Xbox is basically a PC and they’d rather turn away money than see PlayStation games on an Xbox.
They just aren’t making money from them like they used to. You can’t expect to port a game to PC 2 years after it releases, spend $0 on advertising and then say “mhmm, this pc thing isn’t working out, no one’s buying our games”. Check the Steam charts for their last few ports, they’re resembling a flat line. If they dropped the game on PC day 1 they would’ve made more money on PC sales, which is a terrible precedent for them, as it means that the age of the console has come to an end. Luckily, some of Sony’s biggest partners already realized that:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2023-09-25/capcom-targets-smartphone-gamers
It wasn’t free cash, since the ports cost money to make … but they are throwing money away, especially with all the money down the hole on Ghost of Yōtei.
Ghost of Yotei would’ve been a day one purchase for me and I am heartbroken.
Same. I will not, however, be buying a console for it.
I got my pc for gaming, it even lets me tweak accessibility through various controller types, trainers (for single player games), and input mapping when my hand is acting up, allowing me to enjoy games when I would otherwise be unable to.
Shame, I would have loved to play it.
Same. I’ve finished Ghost of Tsushima and fell in love with it - it broke my heart to know that I’ll never get to play Yōtei on PC.
I was even desperate enough to consider buying the fucking PS5 for it, but realised that this predatory tactic is exactly what Sony is counting on, and I refuse to let those scummy anti-consumer strategies take advantage of me and my love for the franchise.
I’m sorry, Sucker Punch; maybe another time. :/
And the sales were sometimes a tiny chunk of what Playstation sold.
There’s no way in hell those games don’t run on PC, you think every dev/artist/designer/etc has their own Playstation devkit for testing things? There was work needed, probably related to PSN and some other optional things that can be turned off for dev builds, but I guarantee you the games were running on PC before anyone even considered porting them.
They run on pc sure. On the spesific spects computers they use. They need things like support for different resolution. Work arounds for the controller only features. If you want to make things like mouse control feel good, it needs lot of fiddling. Optimizing for million different hardware possibilities, error handling, launching, settings, key bindings and propably million other things i cant think right now.
Its not just flicking a switch.
I’m not saying it’s just flipping a switch, but it’s also not the monster that people make it out to be. Porting a game to a console is usually a lot harder, but the vast majority of things should work on a PC already as they were probably developed and tested on a PC.
Honestly emulations been around for ever idk how many games I’ve played on PC that I shouldn’t have been able to. It’s just a matter of when not if
Yes, but making a port of a game to a console involves using the console’s APIs for things. Things like input, network, graphics and others can’t use generic libraries in consoles like you can on PC. If you’re making a game on a modern game engine a lot of that is abstracted away for you, but if you’re working on a game engine or a game written from scratch you need to take these things into consideration.
Optimizing for million different hardware possibilities
I’m pretty sure modern development has APIs that abstract a lot of that away from you. It’s not 1999 when you need to talk directly to the hardware anymore
It’s not just that, but I thought that replying to every single point would be too verbose. But you might be interested:
On the spesific spects computers they use.
On a big studio Dev’s hardware can be as varied as on the real world, and while yes they’re usually beefy PCs, they’re not at all uniform.
They need things like support for different resolution.
Which for the most part is just natively done by changing the render size of the canvas. Only some games, and almost never ports, take resolution into consideration for other things like menu layout and even then it’s usually just 2 or 3 different configurations.
Work arounds for the controller only features.
Usually the answer to this is “fuck it”, the only things a controller can do that KB+m can’t is rumble, and pressure sensitivity. Pressure sensitivity you get away by mapping two different keys, and rumble you get away with adding audiovisual queues (which you should already have because the rumble might be broken in the person’s controller). Also, controllers work on PC.
If you want to make things like mouse control feel good, it needs lot of fiddling.
Yes, but actually no. This is a solved problem for the most part, there might be some small tweaking needed but a mouse is very intuitive and usually just adding a couple of sensitivity sliders makes it so every person can control their experience at will.
Optimizing for million different hardware possibilities,
If only we had developed standards for hardware like OpenGL/Vulkan, and the OS abstracted most of the other things away for you.
error handling,
Do you think errors don’t happen on console? Error handling is error handling.
launching
Does the game not launch on consoles? Do you think every game needs a separate launcher on PC?
settings
Most of those are already there, the extra ones added are just about graphic control for performance reasons, so it’s usually just using downscaled versions of things or disabling features. And I guarantee you that most of that was in the game already because otherwise it wouldn’t run on Bob’s machine, they just needed to make a pretty UI for it.
key bindings
This is accurate, there might be a considerate amount of effort needed here depending on how lazy devs were. Most people know not to use input directly and abstract it through a layer of actions, but sometimes things slip through.
and propably million other things i cant think right now.
There are other things to consider, things like network stack and input handling are very specific for console development, and if you’re not abstracting them through your own APIs you’re going to have a bad time porting the game. But there are reasons to do this even if you will only ever use one API, so most games should already do that. Also, this is an engine level fix, once you do this for one game, every game using that engine gets that fix.
But hey, what do I know? I only work in the low level network stack for games.
It’s like having a machine where you put a $5 bill in and a $50 bill comes out, but these chucklefucks are going “I dunno, five whole dollars? Seems expensive.”
“This is just devaluing $50 bills!”
I don’t remember, but I think KJP is independent. They just signed a contract with Sony for money for DS/DS2. I don’t know, but I somewhat doubt they’d agree to total PS exclusivity. I think their games do pretty well on PC.
Maybe if they lowered prices instead of raised them…
Yeah, I won’t be buying a playstation, but I’ll definitely buy the next naughty dog game if I have a device that can run it.
Well, I definitely wasn’t going to buy a PlayStation 5 when it was $500, but now that they’ve stopped putting out versions of their games on PC that run better than PlayStation versions, and now that the console costs $650, I’m definitely enticed to buy one!
Damn how much Death Stranding sucks. Both games a waste of time. The second one less, but still flawed in many ways.
