Last month, a report emerged that claimed that Sony would no longer be putting its first-party games like Ghost of Yotei on PC, with online games like Marathon being the exception. The PlayStation maker is yet to confirm or deny this, and the report even noted that Sony’s strategy is “constantly shifting,” meaning this may end up proving untrue. But former Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida says he’s not seen any proof of PlayStation changing their strategy this console generation.
Yoshida recently made an appearance at Powerhouse Museum’s ALT. Games Festival as a keynote speaker, and took part in an interview with the Back Pocket podcast (ta, Respawn First) where he spoke of PlayStation’s shift to PC. “When I was working on the game development side, first-party at PlayStation, from a strategy standpoint, we [were] not allowed to bring our triple A games to other platforms like PC,” Yoshida explained. He goes on to note that with the increase of game development scale and costs that it made sense to him that during the PS5 generation first-party games started releasing on PC.
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The big thing with this move, to Yoshida, is the ability to help bring money back in after those big expenditures. “Releasing games on PC after a couple of years must have helped recoup the investment of these big budget games and help the team and company to reinvest that money into their new games,” he said. It’s on this point that he says that he’s “not seeing any proof of them changing the strategy this generation,” but if they are, “it’s going to be interesting to [see] how they are able to maintain the investment on the big budget games on [the] first-party side going forward.”
Leaks related to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 positioned it as having a $300 million budget, making it one of the most expensive games of all time. While PlayStation have struggled with their PC releases, often due to a mixture of flat out bad ports, keeping that completely off the table does seem like a potentially odd move. If there’s no sign of Ghost of Yotei on PC by the end of 2027, and no official word from Sony, perhaps then we’ll have our answer.
