yup.
HFW's price has been slashed quite a few times on PS5, and wasn't it even free on PS+ for a month?
To turn around and charge full price on PC all this time later is a difficult ask.
But I was told PC gamers are a different audience. So if that's actually true...why would price cuts and PS+ inclusion for the game on PS5 have any relevance to the PC customer? Those are things outside of their ecosystem, right?
Unless you mean to tell me...that PC gamers view things outside of their ecosystem because at some level they see them as a competing offering for their time and money? Which would make the most common-sense of arguments. The funny part is many people will outright deny that PC (platforms like Steam specifically) are a competitive element to platforms like PlayStation in the very same breath, because that part becomes an inconvenient truth.
Let's just ignore that consoles (well, PlayStation and Xbox specifically) share between 90% - 100% of their library with PC platforms like Steam, alongside those same PC platforms having tons of exclusives not on any console. You've got 99% crossover in 3P software (Vanillaware games being one of few exceptions), anywhere between 80% or so (PS) to 100% (Xbox) 1P title crossover....yet fools still want to deny there is any customer base crossover between platforms.
Or, act like owning a competent PC for "premium" gaming these days is as laborious or exclusive as having an arcade machine in the home, or even having competent gaming PCs/microcomputers in the '80s or '90s (and knowing how to set them up for gaming, which wasn't straightforward or easy to the average person at all, unlike PC gaming today).
But yeah, let Sony continue digging their own grave insofar as console priority and growth is concerned. Microsoft are already in their grave, but at least they have several major vested interests in PC, and even bigger shares in markets like cloud and business software. They can afford to let their console hardware become irrelevant. Sony are not in that same boat and selling off parts of the company like the financial unit will guarantee they never are.
But, it's their choice to make.
An even better solution:-
Buy a Sony console and get that preferential treatment.
What preferential treatment?
They've been a lot slower at it, but Sony have been gradually shifting PlayStation into what Microsoft's done with Xbox. With the news of GOT's PC port and the PSVR2 PC compatibility (but nothing new functionality-wise being announced for it on console), I took a step back to see how many actual 1P exclusives were still exclusive to the console, and I got:
-GOW Ragnarok
-GT7
-Spiderman 2
-Demon's Souls Remake
-Astro's Playroom
...and that's it. I'm not counting GAAS titles, so no Destruction All-Stars (which is a dead game anyhow). Every other game released so far this gen has either been ported to PC already, or other consoles (MLB The Show). And going by the Nvidia leak, we know that GOW Ragnarok, GT7 and Demon's Souls are probably going to be getting PC ports either this year or by early next year, leaving just Spiderman 2 and Astro's Playroom. Considering the other Spiderman games already are on PC, Spiderman 2's port is inevitable.
So considering non-GAAS 1P games we can for sure say at this time will still be exclusive to PS5 for the foreseeable future, the only one you can really count on is Astro's Playroom. Unless Sony officially address the nature of port status for the other and future releases 1P-wise, and considering the Nvidia leak's been 100% accurate so far for Sony's games, we should be operating on the basis of when games like GT7 or Demon's Souls Remake get ported to Steam, not if.
And this is all before the PS5 Pro even launches, halfway into the generation.
THAT'S the messed up part, I feel. Not the ports in themselves, but the fact there have been SOOO many of them in the span of just half the generation so far, where now if we're counting the number of 1P exclusives on PS5 you can do so on one hand and, knowing the high likelihood of some additional ports, less than one hand. So, how does that make PlayStation significantly different in the current context, from Xbox's situation when it comes to 1P exclusives on that system? There is, materially, no difference. Optically, there's a lot of difference because Sony haven't been doing Day 1 for non-GAAS titles, but in a market saturated with so many games to play from other publishers & devs, especially if you're on PC, do you even need Day 1 for Sony's games? Or is waiting 2 years, 1 year, six months even in some cases, negligible?
And if Sony's read is to literally do Day 1 for non-GAAS titles, what are the people who've been dunking on Microsoft for that strategy to Xbox going to say now? Because not only would there be no material difference, there wouldn't even be optical differences any more between the two platforms. Which would look especially sad for PlayStation IMHO, because it'd be the ultimate indignation on the core customer demographic for the platform.
"You aren't good enough for us to prioritize you with preference even though some of you've been supporting us for years or even decades. Sorry." That's what it would effectively be saying quietly, even if it's masked with the same corporate speak of "more games for more people" or whatever.
Instead of making their own platform more competitive for a changing market where indirect competitors are doing more than ever, it'd just be them throwing in the towel because they've lost the spark, the hunger to prove themselves and push the brand to its full potential. I don't just mean sales either, although those'd take a hit. I really mean this from a creative POV, both in the software and business synergies that favor both innovation and growth.
