Do you remember Shuhei ‘yosp’ Yoshida, former PlayStation boss and the head of PlayStation Indies from 2019 until his retirement from the company in 2025? The likeable good-natured executive has recently come out and stated that he doesn’t necessarily think that day-and-date PC releases for triple-A PlayStation games is a very good idea (but, also, that he hasn’t seen any solid proof that Sony is abandoning PC releases altogether despite reports to the contrary).
The quotes come from an interview with Yoshida at the Powerhouse Museum’s ALT. Games Festival (hat-tip, Respawn First), where Yoshida appeared as a keynote speaker. “When I was working on the game development side, first-party at PlayStation, from a strategy standpoint, we [were] not allowed to bring our triple-A games to other platforms like PC,” he reveals.
It’s worth noting at this point that the first ‘big’ PlayStation game of the modern era to land on PC was Horizon: Zero Dawn in 2020. It launched one year after Yoshida’s retirement and kickstarted an era of PS4 and PS5 blockbuster games coming to PC. “As the game development scale and investment became larger and larger, it makes sense for me that in [the] PS5 generation they started to move their big games to PC.
“Releasing games on PC after a couple of years must have helped recoup the investment of these big budget games and help the team and company to reinvest that money into their new games,” he noted during the keynote. “[I’m] not seeing any proof of them changing the strategy this generation, [but] it’s going to be interesting to [see] how [Sony is] able to maintain the investment on the big budget games on [the] first-party side going forward.”
However, there are caveats to the console-to-PC strategy. Whereas Sony adopted the position of releasing games on PC after their console debuts (with inconsistent timing, for the most part), Xbox opted for a ‘day-and-date’ approach… something Yoshida is more skeptical of. “If [Sony] was releasing new triple-A games on day one on other platforms, I don’t think that’s a good strategy for a platform holder like PlayStation.” It’s an interesting outlook, and one that seems directly counter to Xbox’s next-gen Helix plans, in which Microsoft seems to be basically making its own version of a Steam Machine by making the next console a PC-like device.
It’s not the first time Yoshida has spoken out about the PC release strategy over at Sony: last year, he opined that the strategy was “almost like printing money”, and was a great way for Sony to generate income to reinvest in other projects around the company. But, of course, there are always downsides to porting your exclusive games to other platforms, as the former exec is only too aware of. “Some vocal small number of consumers complain when they see the PlayStation first-party games are ported to PC,” he said, “but I do not think that really affected adoption of PlayStation hardware like PS5 in any way.”
It’s going to be interesting to see what actually happens with Sony going forward, then. The most recent example of Sony porting games to other platforms – to massive success, no less – was Helldivers 2, even if it took the better part of 18 months to make the jump. Will that be the core tenet of PlayStation’s strategy going forward: get a second bite of the apple much, much later, and keep people locked into the PlayStation ecosystem during the major post-launch hype window? It seems to be working so far. But then, as the next generation begins to come into clearer focus, everything appears to be changing.
