So lame. I thought we were in a good spot once they started allowing PC release. Personally I'm way more upset about this vs the all-digital future they're selling.
Amazingly short period between Sony claiming the console war victory and Sony panicking about Steam/Microsoft with no more PC ports and diving head first into digital only.
Like damn, the PSN/Helldivers 2/Steam delisting fiasco must have really upset Sony.
Which is hilarious because Helldivers 2 is one of the few times in gaming a studios incompetence actually made the game better.
The whole account linking thing was supposed to be mandatory day one. But because Arrowhead was struggling to work out bugs and the game had really terrible server issues starting out they were told to implement a bypass so Steam users could play. Their initial struggles are actually one of reason the game took off because the bypass allowed anyone and everyone access. If it stayed required? Nobody would have gave that game a chance on PC.
Meanwhile Sony knew all this. They knew the servers were messed up and Sony knew Arrowhead was struggling to fix things. They knew the game was benefiting from being able to be purchased in places PSN didn't exist. And yet there response was? Remove the bypass and force it on everyone!
Like that's tremendous big brain time right there.
It's hilarious to me because Helldivers 2 was one of the few gems in Sony's Concord/Marathon era and they still fucked Helldivers 2 with the PSN requirement.
Having seen Sony's attempts at movies and the executive leaks from before the pandemic...I genuinely just think the Sony leadership are stupid. Like, notable in any industry stupid.
It's the other way around. AH were fully aware of the mandatory PSN linking (this was even on the Steam page and prelaunch marketing material), they relaxed the rule and failed to communicate that it was temporary. Then CEO, Pilestedt admitted this.
Their laughable incompetence should have upset them more. The only thing separating Sony and Microsoft is that Sony's previous leaderships had an eye for talent, and were able to accumulate enough good first party studios to carry them for over a decade.
It really sucks how badly Xbox has dropped the ball on exclusives , I feel like Sony has made so many anti consumer choices but since Xbox is so behind there wasn’t much pushback, I’m glad people are calling out this only digital thing though
Tbh if Xbox had their way and Gamepass became successful in taking down Playstation then we may even be transitioning now to not owning games and just subscribing so they all need each other to keep things in line.
Probably the fact that they were old games for full price with next to no sales. But it's also just possible when you aren't locked into a Playstation consoles, the games don't quite have the same impact and appeal.
Right now is a hardware crunch in the industry and Nintendo and Sony have the edge of being close to suppliers and a solid commitment to steady production unlike Steam being new and Microsoft having a brain-fart thinking anything could be an Xbox if you can download games on it.
Not only the anything is an Xbox thing, they also dropped the ball hard with the xbox one and focusing on a "home entertainment system" instead of a game system.
It was a fumbled release too, with two similar looking consoles of different generations released at the same time with basically indistinguishable names. I've got a degree and I still couldn't tell which was the new generation and which was the re-release.
also Xbox completely and utterly failing to provide any competition whatsoever, like fuck sony, but Microsoft absolutely squandered every dev they purchased in the last 10 years.
Well yea they know that. But them allowing games to be sold outside of PlayStation was directly devaluing the reason to have a PlayStation especially long term.
That makes them way more money than the game sales.
You mean price? That doesn't matter to me much, but I'm not going to buy a console to play its exclusives. If I want a game I dont mind paying full price. They can keep their game discounts. Better for customers to make them available. But they dont care about the customers, obviously
Sony must not have agreed with you when they started releasing games on PC. I get what youre saying, but its anti consumer and i wont support it. I dont really care what their justification is. I was just saying it sucks, which it objectively does.
I think it’s especially scummy that they decided to release on PC but then pulled back the decision. I played the GOW games and I loved them, spiderman too. Now I gotta buy a ps5/6 to play the rest of the franchise? Fuck off sony. It’d be one thing if they never did it in the first place.
I mean... they did change course due to the fact they saw a bunch of feedback saying people were more willing to transition to PC if their games were there.
Sony sold PC games for a couple years out of their 30-year PlayStation existence. it is not anti-consumer to make software exclusive to the hardware you also make.
gamers just want to have their cake and eat it too. it's normal for hardware manufacturers to give customers a reason to buy their hardware. that is literally the whole business model.
not exactly what I am saying. that is how it works. in a world with no exclusives, we wouldn't really have consoles at all. they don't financially make sense without them.
the way things are going, they might not make financial sense with them. that would be bad for most people trying to play video games, imo.
To be fair, when they released the numbers of sales on pc for their games, they were almost all really bad with just a couple exceptions. As far as singleplayer games though, spider-man 2 sold the most copies with only 300k sales on pc. It’s not a terribly small number, but it’s not a good number by any means either when triple A games cost so much to make now. It just didn’t seem worth the cost of the port + not having true exclusives for their ecosystem that drives hardware sales.
I hate the all digital shit, but once they released those PC numbers for the singleplayer games, it makes sense why they would pull back
I mean from a business standpoint point it just makes sense, there is no reason to buy a PlayStation if I can get all the same games on a pc or Xbox. Same with Xbox, consoles are sold at a loss because they make money by you being in their ecosystem, they need exclusives to keep people there.
I like to believe that they were going for the rockstar formula (i.e. the double dip).
Release a game to be console exclusive, wait 2 years, release again titled Remastered, Complete Edition etc on both consoles AND PC. Consoles get discounts but PC owners pay full price (no regional pricing) for a 2 year old game.
I mean thats basically what they did. Release the game 2 years later on PC at full price. Except they were usually lesser desired games, released with little to no marketing or fanfare and they were almost all bare minimum ports with shit performance.
No one gives a shit about Returnal 2 or 3 years later and certainly not when the port has major issues. If they want to wait years later it needs to be a major IP. If they had put Demon Souls or Bloodborne on PC they would have made bank.
Instead we now have Bloodborne emulated and sony wont get anything.
I personally don't really care about digital only games. I've been digital only since before it was the only option.
What I find strange is that the second Sony goes full digital only mode, they decide they can't make games for the system that's been the BIGGEST supporter of digital only games throughout it's history...
Honestly their PC ports sucked, lots of them have memory and performance issues. Plus the PC releases meant there was basically no reason to get a PS5 besides it being cheaper than a PC with equivalent performance.
1080p might be easy to reach nowadays, but that still meant spending 1K or more on a brand new PC (especially now with the memory crisis) and 1440p was also very prevalent with the PS5, which requires even more powerful hardware and a higher price tag
There is a PC version of playstation that works similar to xbox game pass, btw. Never used it, but it's out there and licensed by Sony so you can play a lot of their games on PC if they aren't on steam.
Due to the physical game situation or due to not having a ps5? If the latter then fair enough, if the former it is getting a physical release and with physical games none of the money you spend goes to Sony, that was already done by the store you buy the copy from (altho getting physical from Amazon probably still goes to Sony I’d guess)
I still plan to get ps5 games until 2028, but I’m only ever going to get physical games.
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u/OverloadedSofa 19d ago
I mean, it’s also playstation only. Can’t say I’ll ever get it now