No, they underestimated because they thought pc gamers would want to do whatever is necessary to play the sequel now, but pc gamers will wait forever if they have to rather than buy a console.
…underestimates the Steam crowd’s patience to wait even longer for the games they want to play to become available without having to buy PS5 or sign up for another acount
Playstation CEO doesn’t play games or else they would know how much more flexible PC gaming is for the user. They are hoping people will slum it with console locked ecosystems and non-moddable games using hardware that never improves.
Is the CEO underestimating patience or is the author overestimating?
It’s not as if PlayStation is struggling right now. The PS5 seems to be selling pretty well.
Not to mention that consoles and PC’s are indirect competitors. A lot of people want to use a controller form their couch without jumping through hoops. Gen Z is trending away from desktops and laptops entirely in favor of mobile devices.
Obviously Sony is unhappy with the performance of the PS5 considering how much they’ve been trying to push PC ports lately. Not to mention Square Enix citing disappointing sales for their last couple of critically acclaimed Final Fantasy games as the reason they’re going to focus on multi-platform support going forward.
Seems like almost every business area of PlayStation is doing well. Hardware, subscriptions, DLC, other micro transactions… The PS5 just became officially their most profitable generation.
They’re looking to maximize revenue and profit by expanding into the PC market. It’s great to see because it gives consumers more choice. That absolutely should not be interpreted as any sort of sign of weakness for the PS5. The PS5 seems to be doing better than the PS4 did, and the PS4 did well. They have crushed Xbox to the point where people are speculating Microsoft might want out of hardware. The Switch is harder to compare against because it’s near (really should be past) the end of its life, but the PS5 has been selling at a faster rate.
PC gaming is just starting to get back in track after a few down years for hardware sales (largely related to supply shortages and price gouging, especially GPU’s). But it’s starting to turn around, and it seems like Sony wants a piece of that. The question should not be “why is Sony pushing PC ports”, but “Why is Nintendo not porting to PC”.
Square-Enix has been mismanaged for decades and I don’t think is worth paying attention to.
It’s not that the PS5 is doing bad (it isn’t), it’s that they want more money, simple as that. They saw what Microsoft was doing and they decided they wanted a piece of the pie too.
Nothing is “obvious” about that. What you present as the only possible conclusion from their actions is just your subjective interpretation. Could be true, of course. I highly doubt it (which is my subjective interpretation).
Someone realized that the investment required for making a PC port (or having the studio include it) is less than the money you can make from selling it on PC. Selling consoles (the hardware) isn’t what makes them money, it’s reasonably common for them to be sold at a loss, especially early in the life cycle. Profit comes from people buying games they take a cut from, which is unchanged if Sony is also the publisher (or even the developer).
In any case, if I’m right or wrong isn’t even the point either (I’m probably wrong, too). The point is it’s incredibly complicated, and nothing is even slightly “obvious” about it.
We (PC gamers) have a wide swath of hardware and input preferences that consoles do not even make an ATTEMPT to accommodate. Then there’s the predatory “pay us a subscription to play online” thing, too.
Most PC gamers will just completely skip consoles rather than play games like that. Our patience is eternal and without end.
Don’t forget things like locking everyone into their ecosystem. Case in point, Minecraft. On the pc using Bedrock I can connect to any server. Xbox and Nintendo versions I know for a fact you can only connect to approved servers. Not sure about the PS version, but I would venture it’s similar. So why would I want to limit myself by playing their locked down copy of the exact same game?
I think that’s accurate for a subset of PC gamers but there’s no shortage of people pre-ordering trash games or encouraging other shitty behavior like microtransactions on PC. Many of those problems could be solved with a patience that doesn’t currently exist in sufficient quantities to discourage publishers from bad practices.
This is just my theory, but with the price of game development increasing so rapidly, I think it’s getting harder for the impatient to cover the development costs and make a profit off shitty games, unless the game has a huge following. Games like COD, Diablo, Star Wars, etc.
For games without that following, I think they are definitely being punished for their bad practices. Like Gotham Knights, Red Fall, Saints Row, etc. Games that cost so much that they have potential to shut down studios
Seriously. I was thrilled to see Sony start porting over interesting looking games, but if they go back to their previous release standard, I’m fine going back to my previous “not playing ps exclusives” standards. I’ve got plenty of other games to get to. No need to go out of my way to get over the hurdles they put up.
yup especially the pc gamer, especially with the presence of lots of banger indies, is spoiled for choice, that exclusivity is less of something enticing. And selling on FOMO don’t work as well when there’s also tons of f2p games competing on such feelings.
“we’ve built a platform that at least give piracy a run for its money, and used it to develop a massive user base so conditioned to buying from us that they happily joke about how 50% off a game they won’t play is cause for them to buy four times as many. Please, join us all in the baffling orgy of commerce, all we ask is 30% of the treasure.”.
“We will, but we’re gonna try to get the users to come to our platform with less content and maybe a $500 buy-in so we can have a bigger portion of a smaller pie”.
“Lol, go for it”.
“…”.
“…”.
“Why are you being anticompetitive?”
The hilarious thing is that Sony could open their own pc storefront selling steam keys, keep their 30%, and the only restriction would be maintaining price parity with the same game on the Steam storefront.
For a. Company like Sony that already has all the payment processing and customer service knowhow, this would be far easier for them than most.
Yet they can’t or won’t bother because suits are fucking stupid.
Shit, I assumed that valve somehow got a cut of games from keys as well, but looking it up (briefly), it looks like you’re entirely right and they don’t.
That makes it even more bonkers that companies keep trying to siphon off the market share, since you could just take your market proceeds as bonus revenue as long as valve got their share of what they sell.
I’m assuming that’s a big chunk of how things like humble bundle make their money?
You can’t actually, they won’t let you generate more keys if you sell fewer units through Steam directly (probably not 1:1, they don’t state precise numbers as it’s up to their discretion).
Here’s the relevant part of their website for reference:
If you request an extreme number of keys and you are not offering Steam customers a comparable deal, or if your sole business is selling Steam Keys and not offering value to Steam customers, your request may be denied and you may lose the privilege to request keys.
I find it hard to believe Sony would run afoul of these guidelines. I’m not sure what they mean by “if your sole business is selling steam keys”. Maybe referring to shovelware ‘developers’ that use steam for laundering money, if I had to guess.
Parity in this case would likely mean nearly everyone just buys directly from steam. No doubt Sony would infect the gaming process by injecting their launcher no matter what you do, but steam will get their 30%.
I don’t know what Sony could offer on their own storefront that plays well with parity rules to make people choose it over steam.
But the thought of them operating their own store front and offering steam keys with every sale won’t happen. Valve have stopped that in the past.
God preach here. "Our storefront works half the time, is clunky, bulky, filled with flashy ads and no substance, allows no customization, you can’t add your own games, you can’t run it on Linux, and our games will always assume you’re trying to pirate or hack even when we know you just bought the game. Switch over now! You’ll love it!
That would be like buying a car for ten times the price, limiting it to 10 kph and forcing yourself to sit on a 30*8 cm dildo while driving it: Way too expensive, limiting in every way and extremely uncomfortable.
It’s not even about waiting or patience. I’m not a teenager anymore, so I don’t have as much to play games as I used to (and I have now other interests too). I have so many great PC games in my queue I literally won’t have time to play them all until I die. The queue only gets longer with time. So what if I can’t play some console exclusive? It’s just one game in the long list of games I won’t get to play and I have no problems with that.
I don’t have the tech-saavy for emulation, and I’ll still wait for console exclusives to come out on PC (unless we’re talking Nintendo exclusives I’m actually interested in). I’ve actively waited for Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game to no longer be a Facebook exclusive, and now I’m doing the same for Out Of Scale.
Remember when Facebook’s overarching company bought out Oculus? Well, some VR games seem to start out as exclusives on the “quest” headsets. (I know Facebook [the parent company] changed their name to “Meta”, but I refuse to acknowledge that)
On Linux it would be ideal if they could use pipewire to have separate audio streams for the game, a mic input, and all other PC audio. This is what I currently do using obs’ replay buffer for clipping.
Not going to X (or any wrappers) but I’m curious what “supported games” means. Because I would expect that it’s actually “games that have supported timeline markers” like how they integrate rich presence. Devs could just use a new header and have this nifty feature.
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