A former PlayStation employee’s LinkedIn profile offers a revealing look at how much money Sony’s PC push actually brought in. The number is not tiny on paper, but the more telling detail is that it took three years to get there, while PlayStation’s console software business could reach the same level in a single year.

Jerry Liu served as PlayStation’s PC Planning and Analytics Lead from January 2021 to June 2023, and on LinkedIn he says that during his time overseeing the unit, its net revenue grew from $0 to $300 million. His work included building analyses that convinced management to adopt a more aggressive pricing strategy, which in turn boosted the division’s gross revenue by 25%. He also examined PlayStation’s catalogue to identify valuable but underused titles that could be brought to the PC market.

That sounds solid until the comparison gets uncomfortable. PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 software sales reached that same benchmark in a single year, which means the PC business needed three years to do what Sony’s native console ecosystem could do much faster. From that angle, it becomes a lot easier to understand why there may have been internal doubts about whether this strategy was ever as commercially powerful as it looked from the outside.

Recent rumors have only added fuel to that interpretation. In March, reports suggested that PlayStation might be backing away from porting more single-player games to PC, with claims that Steam plans for Ghost of Yōtei and other titles had been scrapped. That would be a notable shift, because over the past few years games such as Returnal, God of War, God of War Ragnarök, the Marvel’s Spider-Man titles, and the Horizon series all made a visible splash once they reached PC. Even so, broader research and current reporting suggest those ports often ended up with relatively modest player penetration.

And this is where the most obvious counterpoint comes in. Just look at how long PC players had to wait for many of these releases. Days Gone took nearly 25 months. God of War took close to 45 months. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection arrived after nearly 9 months. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales needed 24 months, Sackboy: A Big Adventure took 23, The Last of Us Part I remake almost 7, Returnal took 22.5, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart needed 25.5 months. In other words, Sony often made the PC audience wait two to three years before those ports even showed up.

That is the part that makes the whole thing feel partly self-inflicted. It is fair to debate how important PC should be to PlayStation, but if the ports only arrive years later, a huge portion of the hype is already dead by then. The launch is no longer fresh, the conversation has moved on, spoilers are everywhere, and attention has drifted elsewhere. If Sony had really wanted faster returns from its PC strategy, it probably should not have kept PC players waiting that long in the first place.

Source: Insider Gaming, LinkedIn