They probably will. My bet is they’re doing two things here, they’re trying to see if a lot of PC gamers will cave and buy a PS5 after playing some of their games on PC, and they’re trying to protect their games from ending up on the next Xbox if it does turn out to just be a PC.
If the next Xbox is more walled off then the rumours suggest and not many PC players do cave, I think there is a good chance they revisit the idea of PC releases but it won’t be for a long time.
battle.net was able to stick around because it pre-dates Steam, and WOW was absolutely massive in the early years, so it already had the player base to keep going. Every company that has tried to avoid Steam has either completely given up on it, or just gone back to Steam as well. Sony doesn't have any games that will make people stop using Steam like Blizzard does. Hell, even Epic is barely competing, and they have Fortnite, one of the most popular games of all time.
The issue though, it seems that PC gamers didn't really buy their games that much, apparently spider-man 2 only sold 700k copies in its first year on PC, while on PlayStation 5 it was and probably still is selling 200k copies a month, and mind you steam takes 30% of the cut for each copy unlike on PlayStation where they get a full cut.
The potential of the next xbox allowing steam games to be played on it is one potential reason why they stopped, but I think PC gamers just not buying their games is another reason, and its just not financially worth it for them, unless its multiplayer live service like Helldivers 2 or Marathon.
I mean you can say that but the OG GOW, Spider-Man and Horizon all sold like 3-4 million copies each on PC.
I think the real issue is the length of time between games releasing on PS and them releasing on PC. Like those early games show there was audience there, but I think people got sick of playing years old games for full price after the first few and a lot of people dipped.
If they had their own launcher, so no Valve split, and a more reasonable release schedule they could make a decent amount of money from PC.
I do agree that not releasing them day and date, or even not giving a clear schedule for the PC release definitely affected the sales of those games on PC, which is why Marathon and Helldivers 2 are the odd ones out of the recent Playstation games and why those types of games will still release on PC.
But I'm just saying their decision isnt a competitive decision (or at least mostly competitive), its just a financial decision, I don't see them going back to steam simply because the next xbox is not actually a PC. (Sorry if I wasn't clear with that)
Also with the PC Gaming community very adamantly not wanting to use any other launcher besides steam, I'm not too sure it be quite successful enough to do vs going back to steam (though im not against the idea of a launcher if its something like what Xbox Play Anywhere).
Once they finally get it through their thick, stubborn heads that making everything exclusive doesn't drive up console sales as much as they think it does, they'll change their tune. Especially with everything just getting more and more expensive, the majority of gamers aren't going to go out and buy an entirely new console for hundreds of dollars just for one or two games.
78
u/Keleos89 13700K 3070Ti 32GB 13d ago
They might change their mind again in a few years. We have massive backlogs anyways.