How would PC not be in their development pipeline? Sony already stated Gaas games would also be on PC day one, we all know this includes games such as The Last of Us Factions which will more than likely be a huge mp/gaas game. What am I missing with this news? This was confirmed over a month ago.
I mean yeah, that's true, but the vagueness in these statements towards the type of games leaves room for interpretation that they're also referring to non live-service/GaaS titles and that's kind of a different matter altogether if true.
There is no vagueness on their statements. Sony said their main development teams like ND will continue focused on PS only game. Some of their games -not all their future games- will be ported by other teams to PC where will be released years later than their original PS release, at least a year in the case of the SP/non-GaaS ones.
In the case of the GaaS, they said that some of them might even be released on PC even probably day one, but this doesn't mean all their GaaS will be released on PC and doesn't mean that all the ones released on PC will be released on PC day one.
Knowing that, it's fair to assume that future ND games will end sooner or later ported to PC, so makes sense to adapt their engine and pipeline to PC games. Their engine already has a PC base added by the porters with TLOUP1 and the Uncharted remakes, so it will be there for future projects. Probably added PC and mouse in addition to gamepad to make testing the game while developing faster, in case they didn't already had it before.
In fact, many of these things probably already had it since many years ago before they planned to start porting their stuff on PC, just for the sake of internal testing and allowing their devs test their stuff on their own PC instead of constantly needing to make new builds in the devkits/testkits in order to save a lot of time waiting for these new builds to test stuff. Nowadays with all the remote work is even more important, so testing their own stuff in their own PC without devkit required is more important.
This doesn't mean that ND will make the whole PC port or that they are considering to put all their games on PC, or to release them day one or soon. It means that now they consider PC as one very likely platform where they'll release their games so will integrate it on their pipeline. They'll do their games mainly for PS5 but will work on their gamedev PCs, which in AAA games typically means ultrapowerful monsters to run future high end games very unoptimized until the last periods of development and with a lot of debugging and profiling stuff running on top. As I remember that the original very first The Division 1 reveal trailer was recorded running on a PC with 24GB of RAM, which for the time was something really insane. I saw the extended unedited version of that gameplay video back then.
And later another team of PC porters will make the commercial PC versions: will further optimize stuff, add extra settings, implement the latest PC specific tech like DLSS and similar stuff, additional things like ultrawide screen and adapt the game to non 16:9 aspect ratios if needed (like 16:10 for SteamDeck), implement and cut stuff to scale it down as needed to make it run decently on PCs that are less powerful than the consoles (like SteamDeck), will fix many compatibility issues and PC specific bugs that may appear and a lot of other additional boring work more like adapting the trophies or implementing other Steam specific stuff required to release it as a commercial port that doesn't need to be done for the console release.
This additional work of the PC porters doesn't need to be done while they are developing the game. ND will do the PS5 version keeping in the game some base code to run it on PC, and in some games during development and in some other games year later the porters will do the rest of the work.
And even if when releasing the PS5 version in some cases they may have ready -or almost- a PC port, doesn't mean they'll release it when ready. Due to Sony's strategy they may decide to keep the PC port in the shelf during a few years before releasing it -or maybe even to don't release it- because they may want to sell as much units on PS and put it on PS+ before relesing it on PC to use it as selling point and to save the 30% revenue share that Steam gets, or maybe want to save the PC port for another priod of the year with less competition or to align it with the release of a sequel or movie/tv series adaptation or something like that, or maybe to separate it from other PC releases they may have around that period.
