Over the last year, Sony has adopted a new approach to PC releases, which has seen the company bringing over some of its biggest games to PC several years after their initial launches. PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has explained that it’s all about wanting to take the opportunity “to expose those great games to wider audience”, and as such, the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone have released for PC, while Uncharted 4 is apparently next.
It’s quite a different approach from the one Microsoft has had for several years now, which sees them treating Xbox and PC essentially as equal platforms. Very nearly all of their first party offerings launch for Xbox and PC simultaneously, and are also available for free for Xbox Game Pass subscribers across both platformers. In a recent media briefing, Xbox boss Phil Spencer was quick to point out those differences, criticizing Sony’s policy of bringing their games to PC several years after launch, and “charging twice” for them.
“Right now, we are the only platform shipping games on console, PC and cloud simultaneously,” Spencer said (via VGC). “Others bring console games to PC years later, not only making people buy their hardware up front, but then charging them a second time to play on PC. And of course, all of our games are in our subscription service day one, full cross-platform included.”
“We have a huge growth opportunity on PC,” he continued. “We expanded to simultaneously shipping our first-party games on both console and PC. And last year we more than doubled our first-party retail games sales on PC. And we’re also one of the biggest third-party publishers on Steam.”
Sony has maintained that even as it looks to bring more of its games to PC, PlayStation is always going to be their top priority- so whether or not that changes and they adopt an approach more similar to Microsoft’s remains to be seen. Both companies have very different strategies and outlooks though, so for now, it seems quite unlikely.