I’ve spoken before about how I was excited about Sony games coming to PC but that was over two years ago! Since then, we have seen Sony begin to release their first-party games on PC such as Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, God of War (2018) etc. and I’ve been eager to see how successful these have been and to try to figure out what sort of plans Sony has for PC. Recently, we got an incredible source of information regarding both how these previous releases have done and Sony’s plans for the future. Taking that into account, I thought I’d talk about the exciting potential of Sony’s PC push and what I’d like to see happen.
Let’s start with the new information that we’ve received. Sony recently held an investor meeting and one of the more notable aspects of this meeting were several slides they shared regarding the PC. If you take a look at the slide below, you’ll see that Sony has actually shared how much each game has sold on PC over the course of their lifetime. Horizon Zero Dawn, which was released on PC on the 7th of August, 2020, has sold almost 2.4 million copies on PC and has grossed $60 million. Days Gone was released on the 18th of May, 2021, and has sold about 850,000 units, grossing $22.7 million. Finally, God of War, only just released this year on the 14th of January, has already managed to outsell Days Gone by nearly reaching 1 million sales and grossing $26.2 million. While the sales figures are very much what I expected, I do confess to being quite surprised by these revenue figures, which I want to emphasise are still very successful, which seem lower than I expected, probably due to regional pricing.
However, as fascinating as all that information is, the most intriguing part of this slide is Sony’s expectations for the PC platform over the course of the next year. Having grossed $35 million in 2020 and $80 million in 2021, Sony expects to gross $300 million from releasing PC games by next March! This is interesting because their only confirmed upcoming PC releases are the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection and the recently announced Spider-Man games. While backlog sales will certainly play a strong part, as it clearly did in 2021, quadrupling their PC revenue will almost certainly have to be driven by new releases.
While we’re unsure when and how Sony will announce these new releases, there are already some hints as to what they might be. It was reported near the end of last year that Sackboy: A Big Adventure had been listed on Steam’s database under the codename Steel PC while it has recently been reported that Returnal has also been listed on Steam’s database. Additionally, some Sony games were also listed in the Nvidia game leaks back in September which included the two previous games plus others such as Demon’s Souls, Ratchet & Clank, Ghost of Tsushima and many others.
Additionally, Sony has said that they hope to have about 30% of their releases be on PC by 2025. I presume they mean by yearly releases given the chart above but that’s still a sign that they are committed to growing on PC. Another sign of this push is the fact that Sony is hiring a “senior director for PC planning and strategy” which, although I think they should’ve hired this position sooner, is good news.
With regards to my own thoughts on Sony’s PC push, I’m happy that they’re doing it even if I haven’t benefited too much from it so far. I did end up buying Horizon Zero Dawn when it was on sale but I found it to be quite a lacklustre game myself. I have no intention of buying Days Gone but I am intrigued to play God of War at some point. However, what I would really love to see is Sony dipping into their back catalogue of games. While I obviously would love to play Bloodborne or Demon’s Souls, most of the other Sony games I want to see released on PC come from the PS1/PS2 era such as Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Ape Escape, Wild Arms etc. I think the chances of this are slim since I suspect Sony is going to focus on porting PS4 and PS5 games but I can still hope.
While I’ve found Sony’s releases on PC to be far too slow for my liking, I’m quite excited to see what’s going to happen over the course of the next 12 months. Let me know your thoughts on the exciting potential of Sony’s PC push, which games you’d like to see ported, your thoughts on Sony’s strategies, whether you think they’ll release games from their back catalogue or if they’ll stick to PS4/PS5 games 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.