Bringing PlayStation exclusives to Steam has already generated well over a billion dollars in revenue, yet interest among PC players is clearly fading. What once felt like a major event for every Sony port is now greeted with a shrug, and the newest releases are nowhere near the impact of the first wave.

Roughly five years ago, Sony made the call to stop keeping its first party games locked to consoles and to start bringing them to PC. The plan could not have started much better. Horizon: Zero Dawn arrived on Steam and climbed toward five million copies sold. Taken as a whole, the initiative has been very profitable. PlayStation has kept its strong position in the console space while also carving out a lucrative presence on Valve’s platform. Estimates suggest that Sony has already generated more than 1.5 billion dollars in gross revenue on Steam alone. Those impressive figures, however, hide some uncomfortable details.

The first one is a particularly bittersweet number. Almost one third of Sony’s Steam revenue comes from Helldivers 2. According to the Alinea Analytics report that compiled these data, Arrowhead’s co op shooter has sold 12.7 million copies and generated more than 400 million euros on PC. PlayStation certainly profits from that success, but it is not a long term win. Their biggest cash generator is no longer a game they fully own. The studio’s CEO has already said in public that their next project will be developed independently. It is not a breakup in bad blood – they keep praising Sony as a fantastic partner – but it is still a clear move toward independence.

Thankfully, other PlayStation titles have also done well on PC. God of War (2018), Days Gone and Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered have collectively passed ten million copies sold and brought in around 375 million dollars. Those are strong results, especially for Days Gone, which has comfortably beaten even the rosiest sales expectations. The Deacon St. John road trip was not a flop on console either – Sony’s first party games rarely are – but it did lag behind the very top tier PS4 exclusives. On PC, however, it has told a different story and has even managed to outsell the Spider-Man remaster.

So where is the problem? It lies in the fact that the best performing PlayStation games on PC are all older releases. If we compare the first 427 days on sale, God of War (2018) sold almost two and a half times as much as God of War Ragnarök. A similar pattern shows up when you put Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered next to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 – the former doubled the latter’s sales during the first 294 days. The Horizon saga is where the gap becomes most brutal. In its first 608 days, Horizon: Forbidden West has barely reached one third of the PC sales that Horizon: Zero Dawn achieved over the same period.

Misleading statistics or a strategy problem?

The Alinea Analytics study is useful because it highlights a clear trend, but it also needs context. Since 2022, Sony has launched more than fifteen PlayStation games on PC. Instead of spacing them out and letting each title breathe, the company has focused on catching up fast. That rush is one of the reasons for the awkward timing in the Marvel’s Spider-Man series. On consoles, five years separated the first game from the second. On PC, there were not even two and a half. That naturally makes the sequel feel less special, which in turn drags down its commercial performance.

The drop in interest for PlayStation ports is also visible in titles such as The Last of Us Part I, Until Dawn and Returnal. Each of them has its own baggage that partially explains the modest numbers, whether it is a technical launch, a niche genre or a late arrival. Even so, none of them has lived up to their potential. The only real outlier has been Ghost of Tsushima. Sony has not shared concrete revenue or unit sales, but we do know that it holds the record for the highest concurrent player peak on Steam among the company’s single player games and that it has kept that audience more consistently than any other port. That naturally raises the question of what might happen if Ghost of Yōtei eventually comes to PC.

Before anyone lights the torches, it is worth stressing that Sony’s performance on PC is far from a disaster. The ports have made money and have expanded the audience. The real issue is that, no matter which angle you look at, PlayStation could be doing much more in this space. Now that the back catalogue has mostly arrived on Steam and Epic, the company is no longer racing against time. That brings us to a strange crossroads. Should Sony double down on the PC market with sharper timing and better tailored launches, or should it pull back and once again lean on console exclusivity to protect the PlayStation brand’s special status?

Source: 3djuegos