I feel like they will eventually backtrack in this.
It’s not 2002 when PS2 was truly dominant across the video game market as a whole. Now you have mobile, Roblox, Fortnite, a giant selection of pretty cheap indie titles on PC, things are a lot more competitive.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Sony hates the fact that PC players pushed back on having a PlayStation network requirement on PC games. And they wanted that data.
But Sony is famous for making super bad decisions and backpedaling so I wouldn’t worry too much. Worst case, their exclusives will be emulated and pirated someday.
If anything, it has encouraged people like me who were happily buying exclusives on PlayStation and PC to stop spending any more money on PlayStation though.
I haven’t really heard anything to corroborate telemetry as the reason for the PSN requirement, though it could be true. I always figured it was just that they wanted to inflate their active user numbers, which are already inflated by people continuing to use PS4s as streaming TV machines.
They started putting games on PC to recoup some of their costs on these enormously expensive games, and now they’re pulling back to exclusivity because they believe it negatively impacts their ability to sell PlayStations. It just seems very damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Part of the issue is they wanted to retroactively put PSN on games already released. Hell Divers 2 being one such game.
now they’re pulling exclusivity because they believe it negatively impacts their ability to sell PlayStations.
Could be several reasons, but this sounds really plausible. Could also do with the rumors about steam being on Xbox, which means Sony PC ports will be on Xbox too.
But I still think Sony’s gonna learn you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
If they had guts they’d put the games on Mac and Linux as well to support players moving away from Windows… but they don’t.
Put them all on steamdeck and advertise it as that
Are there any examples of previous Sony exclusives that don’t work on Linux with proton?
“Sony wireless keyboard and mouse bundle for only 350 dollars.” It’s gonna be micro USB just to fuck with you.
Not in the EU!
USB-C in the EU, micro USB-B in the US that breaks after 100 plug cycles, and a bespoke 36-port parallel connector in Japan just to mess with people.
*shudders
Narrator: It won’t.
Kind of an interesting aspect of the nexus, PS console exclusives on Xbox via the back door.
The same way they did during the PS2 generation. What they don’t realize is they no longer have the same goodwill they had then.
They definitely can’t do what they did during the PS2. Their games back then cost a few million dollars each to make. Now they cost several hundred million. The math works out very differently.
you make it sound like they aren’t in control of every single aspect of the development.
They control the budget.
Games don’t have to cost several hundred million. A fun game is a fun game whether it cost $200 or $200,000,000 to make.
Sure but the PlayStation audience is pretty much full of mainstream gamers that play FIFA and CoD and the occasional grand blockbuster games. Sony basically gave them the expectation that games will become grander and more realistic looking every generation, because that is the edge Sony has over Nintendo. They are not the type that will play low budget indie games or even games with heavily stylized graphics. Sure GenZ has been raised with Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox but they are also the generation that doesn’t really pay for games. Sony’s audience is the millennial who grew up thinking Nintendo is for kids and only realistic looking games matter.
They control the budget but don’t control the results.
Concord anyone?
They certainly feel they have to spend hundreds of millions. I agree those budgets can come down, but you need something desirable enough to make the console purchase feel worth it, and Astro Bot didn’t do the trick (with a budget in the tens of millions, not to say that budget is the only variable here).
