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Sony hopes to entice PC players to PS5 by releasing ‘tentpole’ games for console first
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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ITT: a bunch of people saying "I won't".
You're probably in the minority. There's 16k subscribers in this community and, currently, about 30 million active users on Steam. Most of them have never heard of Lemmy, and heck a lot of them probably were never on Reddit. The PS5 has sold 50 million units- that's over 3,000 PS5's for every subscribed account here.
A lot of users here have PC's that approach or exceed the PS5's capabilities. You have fancy expensive monitors, a nice desk and chair, a gaming mouse and mechanical keyboard. The people this CEO is talking about don't. They may have an old desktop from the pandemic, or a laptop. They might just use their kitchen table as a desk.
Or, heck, they might not even have a desktop or laptop at all. It's still early, but there have been studies suggesting that Gen Z and Alpha are using PC's less and doing more of their computing on phones and tablets.
Overall I thought it was great that Sony started releasing their games on PC (and especially through Steam, usually with pretty decent PC ports). It's great to give consumers more options. Delaying the PC release probably means more time for the devs to work on the port (Sony's PC ports have been mixed on launch, but even the bad ones have gotten fixed pretty quickly afterwards, and it's been a while since the last one). Delaying PC versions seems like a pretty reasonable compromise.
They've been doing this strategy for a few years now, and Sony isn't seeing PS5 grow the way they need it to, and that's in an environment where they're so dominant that their competition has thrown in the towel. PC overtook any one console some years ago, and due to how long it takes Sony to make them now, they don't have the volume of unique exclusives to entice people to buy the console like they used to. This strategy isn't working, and they will pivot. They just need to say, for now, that they're not going to.
What makes you think the PS5 isn't growing how they need it to? It's outselling the Xbox and it isn't close. In a less direct comparison, it's outselling the Switch. It's outselling what the PS4 did, and that was successful. I don't understand where this sentiment that the PS5 is struggling is coming from. The second half of your first sentence even mentions that they're really dominant right now.
I also don't understand "PC overtaking any one console"... Like, how is that even a comparison? When was the last time there were more consoles than consumer PC's.... The SNES era? I'm not even sure about that, you might need to go further back.
Even if you want to talk about just gaming, that's tricky to even start to compare. The closest I can think of is that according to this Steam averaged 120 million monthly users last year. According to this, PSN averaged 118 million monthly users in Q4 2023. That's pretty much dead even. I don't think it makes sense to add other platforms to the PC side without adding in Nintendo and Xbox to the console side, in which case... Consoles have more users and it's not close. And they both are just a fraction of the mobile gaming market anyways.
Sony has absolutely proven that they can generate the unique exclusives that sell consoles. That's.... Why they have the best-selling console right now. Their strategy is working. You could say this about plenty of other consoles at points in the past (PS3, WiiU, 3DS, GameCube, N64, Xbox One). If you even said this a couple years ago about Sony struggling to manufacture PS5's fast enough that might make sense. But they're currently dominating the home console market. So I don't understand why you think they're struggling or need to drastically change the way they do things?
Just to clarify- what strategy are you predicting that they will change?
What makes me think that the PS5 isn't growing how they need to is because they've admitted it with their words and actions. Their margins are thinner, they're not moving as many consoles as they'd expect to at this point in the generation, and they felt the need at all to put their games on PC when they never did before. "Struggling" is the wrong word, but the console business model as it's existed for decades no longer works like it once did.
I'm not talking about number of PCs compared to number of consoles. I'm saying the same game sells more on PC now when it used to sell way more on consoles. Maybe there are a few stragglers that still do better on consoles, but they're rare now. Your number of active users for PSN includes PS3 and PS4 users. I'm included in those PS4 users, and my PlayStation only plays Hulu these days.
The strategy I'm predicting they'll change, despite this PR statement is that PC releases will come out closer to the console version than they do now, and they'd be crazy to do anything else in the wake of Helldivers. Temporary management in the wake of Jim Ryan even said they were going to do this.