Sony has pulled the plug on releasing its marquee single-player PlayStation 5 games on PC, Bloomberg reported, marking a sharp U-turn from the multi-platform experiment it kicked off six years ago. The decision means titles like last year’s samurai blockbuster Ghost of Yotei and Housemarque’s upcoming action game Saros will stay exclusive to PS5. Plans for their PC versions have been scrapped in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
Two externally developed but Sony-published games—Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and the newly announced Kena: Scars of Kosmora—will still make it to PC.
Online titles like Bungie’s Marathon and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls are also unaffected and will launch across platforms as planned.
Delayed ports and declining Steam numbers forced Sony’s hand
The reasoning isn’t hard to piece together. Sony’s PC ports arrived months or even years after their PlayStation launches, long after the initial buzz had faded. The results showed. Steam sales of sequels like God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 all trailed their predecessors by significant margins, per industry data from Alinea Analytics. Spider-Man 2’s peak concurrent player count on Steam was less than half of the original’s.
A faction within PlayStation also grew concerned that PC releases were diluting the console’s brand value, Bloomberg noted. And there’s another wrinkle—Microsoft’s next Xbox is rumoured to run Windows and play PC games, which means a God of War port could theoretically end up running on rival hardware.
Sony goes back to the Nintendo playbook
The move puts Sony closer to Nintendo’s long-standing approach of keeping first-party games locked to its own hardware. Microsoft, meanwhile, has gone the opposite direction, releasing everything on PC and increasingly on PlayStation too.
Sony began its PC push in 2020 and brought over franchises like God of War, The Last of Us, and Ghost of Tsushima via Steam. But the rollout was inconsistent, the messaging was messy, and the mandatory PlayStation Network sign-in requirement rubbed PC players the wrong way. A PlayStation spokesperson declined to comment on the shift. Bloomberg’s sources also cautioned that plans could change again, given how unpredictable the games industry tends to be.
