Hermen Hulst told staff at a Monday morning town hall that PlayStation's single-player games are going back to console-exclusive. Which means Sony euthanising the strategy Jim Ryan announced in 2022, when the then-CEO told investors that roughly half of PlayStation's annual releases would be on PC and mobile by the fiscal year ending March 2026. Which did not work according to the expectations.
I suppose the best example is Spider-Man 2, which sold 16 million copies on PS5 and 700,000 on PC. This revealed PC players are not that interested in console titles. The earlier wave of ports worked because the games felt new to PC players. The recent wave has been arriving as old news, and the discourse around staggered releases has shifted from "thank you Sony" to "why bother."
Helldivers 2 Is the Whole Argument
What's interesting here is that Sony isn't pulling everything from PC. Live-service titles like Marathon, Marvel, Fairgames, and Horizon Hunters Gathering are still going multi-platform, and the reason is sitting right there on the Steam charts.
Helldivers 2, launched day-and-date across PC and PS5, has been a runaway success and accounts for the lion's share of Sony's total Steam revenue. A live-service shooter launched simultaneously is doing what staggered single-player ports stopped doing two years ago, which is bring in actual new players rather than late-cycle conversions. This also means there will be more Day 1 launches.
The Steam Machine and Project Helix Are the Friction Layer
The timing of this reversal isn't only about sales data. Microsoft's Project Helix is positioned as a next-gen Xbox that will play a full Steam library, which means a PlayStation port on Steam is, functionally, a PlayStation game on the next Xbox.
Valve's Steam Machine sits in a similar threat category. The logic holds in plain terms: if your competitor's console can play your back catalogue through Steam, you need to do something to prevent it.
The Live-Service Pivot Is Already Failing Too
The dark joke underneath this whole reversal is that Jim Ryan's 2022 plan had two halves, and both have collapsed. Sony promised twelve live-service games by 2025. As of last summer, only Helldivers 2 had launched successfully. Once again corporate promises di not work, what a surprise.
The rest of the slate produced cancellations, the Concord embarrassment, and the deeply troubled Marathon. Hulst's own framing late last year, that "the number is not so important" and what matters is "having a diverse set of player experiences," is corporate-speak for "we missed our target by a wide margin and don't intend to be graded on it." The PC reversal is the second half of that retreat, it will be interesting to see, how it unfolds in the future.
Kena: Scars of Kosmora is still listed as a maybe. Everything else with a story attached, Ghost of Yotei, Saros, Marvel's Wolverine, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, is staying on PlayStation. Sony's bet now is that exclusives still sell hardware, and that PS6 launches into a market where the only way to play a Sony narrative game is to buy a Sony console. The issue with Microsoft and Steam is only going to get bigger, there is a certain synergy there, and Sony realized this.
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