This is part of what I was trying to convey to Yurinka; I probably don't have an issue with ports to PC as you do, individually speaking, but if Sony establish a cadence, a pattern where the ports to PC are a short time frame after console, how many of the power users who also spend a ton on 3P games & sub services decide to go to Steam for most of their gaming needs? And what could the financial impact of that look like.
As of now, PS5 sales are skyrocketing after solving the chips shortage and will outsell launch aligned PS4.
And a 30% of their PS5 users are new, didn't have a PS4. Meaning that like in every generation they may have new users and may lose other ones, but now in total they are growing with a big flow of new users.
These users interested on these type of game could come from Xbox or PC, but according to MS Xbox is getting better numbers than in the previous generation, meaning that most of the new PS5 users come from PC.
Maybe they are moving to console because the recent PC GPU price are too fucking expensive and the games don't take advantage of their horsepower. Or because they had a tast of Sony's exclusives and want to play ALL the other ones and not only the few ones ported late.
I suppose; the idea of potentially just sending a game out to bomb if you know releasing it at a certain time period or in a certain congested schedule is weird to me, even if you can simply write off the loss as an expense or what-have-you.
FWIW I think Sackboy was ultimately profitable even if it underperformed sales-wise; the budget isn't huge and it didn't have much marketing.
I don't think they sent it to die, they only wanted to test stuff and that data they may get from it may be useful for them beyond the profits it may produce. Not only with launch numbers, but also in future sales, discounts or price cuts and also combined with other games for bundles or adding variety to their PC lineup.
If they're a live-service type of game, like GTA Online, that's where the audiences seem to be at.
They know it, and this is why around a third of their projects are GaaS. And this GaaS or PC ports effort is made on top of their existing tradional projects, without decreasing their input but instead increasing it.
It is something like MS's talk in the past, but I hope these companies realize that when it comes to mobile & even PC, they simply have a different taste in games, games that don't necessarily translate much to console gaming audiences.
I don't think simply porting 1P games with clear homes on console to PC & mobile is going to work out;
Seeing their Wipeout and Sackboy games for mobile they aren't simply porting them. Sure, they'll end having the PS+ cloud gaming streaming in mobile and maybe some game will be ported directly but seems that their mobile games seems are going to be in most cases game designed specifically as separate games for mobile.
Regarding PC, big SP AAA games are working great but very likely their new take on GaaS MP titles will work better both in console and PC. Maybe even a few of these GaaS MP titles may be more PC oriented, like MMORPG for Asian market typical from PC: the rumored Horizon title from that Korean company sounded like that.
It's why if Sony prioritize the live-service GaaS titles for Day 1 on PC,
Sony prioritizes and will continue prioritizing PS, which is by far their main market. And inside their 1st party games their priority aren't GaaS, are the SP AAA games instead.
Some of their GaaS will be ported to PC, not all. And some of them will be released on PC (like the Bungie ones and potentially some day MLB) and others not (like Dreams, PS Destruction All Star, GT7 or -until now- MLB).
I don't know if single-player story-driven games necessarily do big numbers on Steam regularly. Just looked up Plague Tale: Requiem numbers (which ones were freely available) and gross revenue is $8.8 million. At $50 a copy, that's 176,000 copies since release. Even if total copies is more, the bigger point is the actual revenue, it would seem rather small for a game of its type on a platform with 130 million users if the genre of game itself were pretty big there.
Plague of Tale is a small game compared to the big Sony AAA games, which are selling over 15-20M with a single console plus at least a handful million each on PC.
They're gearing up for TLOU Part 1, I guess we'll see how that performs. I would have expected Sackboy to perform a big higher but that was probably due to timing, and we'll see how Returnal does. I think for the kind of game Returnal is, there is a pretty sizable Steam audience that will check it out and pick it up, all things considered.
Returnal and Sackboy are smaller niche games compared to GoW or TLOU. Compared to PS, Returnal fits better with the Steam audience, while Sackboy fits worse than in PS.
Also, Sackboy was released in a too busy period of the year, while Returnal will be released on a period of the year with way lower competition.
Returnal was released when PS5 had a tiny userbase, and Steam has an insanely huge audience.
So Returnal should perform in PC way better than in PS and way better than Sackboy.
TLOU is a too old game like Uncharted 4, but got a more extensive update with the remake and now with the tv show bump I'd bet it will sell very well in PC as seen with Days Gone, Horizon, GoW or Spider-Man. Because also like them and unlike Uncharted 4, TLOU is the start of the story and with Uncharted they did a dumb move starting in PC with the last episode instead of with the first one.
