He even believes those ports helped fund the company’s next wave of blockbusters, which are still in development.

Up through the PlayStation 5 era, Sony’s strategy centered on offering first-party games that were available only on console, using exclusivity to drive hardware sales. In an interview with Back Pocket at the ALT. Games event, however, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida explained that the shift away from that model was essentially forced by ballooning AAA budgets and that it ultimately helped support the development of the company’s internal lineup. The interview was also the one in which he went into detail about how his 11-year career with PlayStation Studios came to an end after Jim Ryan let him go.

With development costs climbing sharply over the past five years, an exclusives-only model became much harder to sustain. According to Yoshida, the level of investment required for modern games grew so large that publishers came to understand that console install bases alone could no longer shoulder the risk. While some hardware purists still argue that PC ports dilute the PlayStation brand, Yoshida dismissed those complaints as the noise of a vocal minority. If publishing first-party PlayStation games on PC has effectively become a financial necessity, then the rumored return to a stricter console-exclusive strategy looks risky on the surface.

“When I was working on game development on the first-party side at PlayStation, strategically we were not allowed to release our AAA games on other platforms like PC. Releasing those games on PC a couple of years later definitely helped recover the investment costs of those big-budget games and allowed the team and the company to reinvest that money into new titles. I don’t think it affected adoption of PlayStation hardware like the PlayStation 5 in any way. I don’t see any evidence that they changed their strategy this generation. But if they are changing, it will be interesting to see how they maintain investment in big-budget first-party games going forward,” Yoshida said.

Since development costs are unlikely to shrink for next-generation consoles such as the PlayStation 6, it will be very interesting to see whether Sony’s rumored return to console exclusivity will actually touch its first-party slate in the way Yoshida suggested. Games such as Ghost of Yotei and the upcoming Saros, neither of which has been clearly tied to a PC port so far, do not yet seem directly affected within their respective categories, but the bigger question remains how Sony plans to absorb swelling production costs while also managing player expectations and the extra revenue streams that PC releases have been bringing in.

Source: WCCFTech