Correct.
I know a few people including my brother who said they will wait for the PC version for games like FF16, Horizon, Returnal and Spiderman 2.
Which means, LESS profits. Because steam will taking a percentage.
There might be little improve in profits margins at first but overall its not gonna be good.
Especially when a certain percentage of PS fans go fully PC and that means all those 3rd party purchases will be on steam and not on PSN.
Hermen wanted games day 1 on PC too, retarded he is
A few people may skip the PS5 version to get the PC version. But there's people who buy both, people who still only buy the PS5 version and people who buy the PC version and never will buy a console. There may even some people who discovers Sony games playing them for the first time in PC and may buy a console to play all the other ones not ported and to avoid having to wait for them to be ported -if the ever get ported-.
If you look at
their results, they keep improving their game sales on both consoles and PC in addition to console hardware sales, game subs and accesories. They grow in all areas, so PC sales are on top of the PS5 ones, aren't replacing them.
SIE made with their games $245M outisde PS in the first half of the current year, and $447M in the previous fiscal year. A combined of $692M on top of what they make on PS (in PS they also make more money than before, so leading to think it isn't stealing sales from there and mostly sales are from players who primarly buy in the other platforms like PC).
Ports are very cheap to make compared to making a brand new AAA game, and gave them almost $700M in a year and half. These are hundreds of millions of extra profit on top of what they make on console, hundreds of millions that now can be reinvested on making more new games.
Already been happening in clear view with Horizon Forbidden West and now Spiderman 2.
Also Shawn Layden never focused on bringing the big marquee games to PC, it was the side games like Predators: Hunting Grounds. I'm almost convinced now that part of the reason he abruptly left SIE was because some internally pushed to bring the marquee games to PC and Layden probably saw what a bad idea that would be long-term for the console's value proposition.
Hence, the sudden exit in whatever power struggle ensued. Jim Ryan, who was mainly focused on short-term financial gains, didn't see an issue with porting the marquee non-GaaS titles, but the long-term effects of that pattern at the current (or accelerated) cadence won't manifest more fully until new hardware launches such as the PlayStation 6.
HFW had a better launch on PS5 than HZD and Spider-Man 2 had a a better launch n PS than Spider-Man 1 had. So if the PC ports of the first games had any effect on the PS5 sales of the sequel was to improve them.
Shawn Layden said he was the one who decided who bring the big marquee games to PC (and his team, obviously: when he was chairman, the president of Worldwide Studios was Shuhei Yoshida) and explained why,. So he didn't leave because of this.
In many cases, before making a big move they make different tests of all kinds before making the big move: with smaller products, testing different product types (in this case genres), diferent pricings, (not for this example) releasing first only in one or a few contries before doing it worldwide, etc.
I think that if there was a power struggle, was because Shawn maybe wanted to replace Yoshida as head of PS Studios, but Sony prefered to have instead someone with the profile of Yoshida: with previous experience producing games and leading gamedev teams, something Shawn didn't have. Or maybe Shawn wanted to be the next SIE CEO, but Sony decided that it twas better idea to put the salesman executive of Europe than the one from USA, because the one from Europe was way more successfult at doing his job.