I recently saw an article which mentioned that Sony was looking for a “PC Planning Analyst” who would assist in “driving sales success and shaping strategy for PlayStation’s fast growing PC business.” While I feel like I should be pleased to see Sony expanding their PC division, known as PlayStation PC, I am simply reminded of my growing frustration with them instead. While it’s highly unlikely that any people from Sony with the ability to make significant changes to their PC strategy will read this, I thought I’d keep yelling into the void we know as the Internet in the perhaps vain hope that something I say may make a difference in some shape or form. Given all of that, here is my suggestion for Sony and their efforts on PC.
I’ve already made a bunch of suggestions in the past with regards to Sony and their efforts on PC but my new suggestion is inspired by a few news articles that I’ve been seeing lately. The first was a news article from last year that stated fans had developed a PC port of the first Jak and Daxter game that is remarkably high-quality with numerous features such as higher framerates and resolutions. The second was from this summer where a fan ported the PS1 game Wipeout to PC and dared Sony to “either let it be, or shut this thing down and get a real remaster going” while adding “I’d love to help.” The final news came from November, just last month as of the writing of this article, and noted that the fans who had ported Jak and Daxter to PC had now ported its sequel, Jak II, to PC.
So what exactly is my suggestion for Sony and their efforts on PC? Many of the games that I’d love to see Sony release on PC are from their large back catalogue of games that they’ve been releasing ever since the PS1 era and the recent efforts by fans clearly shows that passion for these games is not lost. While I understand that it’s always tempting to focus on more recent releases when it comes to PC ports, I argue that the demand of fans for these classic games should be met and propose that Sony should establish a new PC porting studio.
For those wondering, yes, I know that Sony already has a PC porting studio in the form of Nixxes which they acquired in 2021 and has since assisted in patches for Horizon Zero Dawn, ported Marvel’s Spider-Man, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart to PC and are now currently working on the PC port of Horizon Forbidden West. However, it seems that Sony wishes them to focus on recent titles and that’s something that I understand since they include a wide variety of lovely PC features such as ultra-widescreen, ray-tracing, unlocked framerates etc. which may not be possible to include in older games.
Therefore, I think Sony should establish a new PC porting studio whose main goal would be to port Sony’s classic titles to the platform. This could consist of hiring these fans who’ve already ported some games or it could be new specialists but they would focus on porting classic games to PC with a minimum of essential PC features such as a diverse range of resolutions, 60 frames per second or higher, working keyboard and mouse controls, remappable controls etc. As much as I’ve tried to find out, I don’t know the specific costs associated with porting games to PC as it seems they can be quite variable but I can’t imagine it being a terribly costly process given the capability that fans have shown and particularly relative to the budgets Sony is dealing with when it comes to development of their first-party games. This would allow Nixxes to continue porting more modern titles while this hypothetical new studio focused on porting these classic games.
Let me know your thoughts on my suggestion for Sony and their PC efforts, what you think about the idea of setting up a PC porting studio dedicated to their back catalogue, the pros and cons of such an endeavour, whether you’re familiar with the costs associated with porting video games to PC and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.