As great as all of the PlayStation exclusives have been this past generation, all gaming enthusiasts know that console exclusive games aren’t the most consumer friendly business strategies. Sony has been a big purveyor of utilizing exclusives as a means of selling more PlayStations, and to the company’s credit they’ve sold record numbers for PS4 consoles as a result. Although recently Sony bucked that trend with Horizon: Zero Dawn making its way to PC in early August.
Recently, Sony has expressed a desire to bring even more PlayStation games over to PC in the hopes of expanding PlayStation’s portfolio. It’s nothing concrete, as it seems Sony is only experimenting with the idea, but expanding to PC could only be beneficial for the PlayStation brand. Starting with old games and porting them is the perfect way not only to appease PC fans, but to also serve as a subconscious invitation to the PlayStation brand, especially if there’s a sequel to that game coming. Here’s why Sony should bring more PlayStation exclusives to PC.
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Sony wanting to preserve the integrity of its exclusives makes a lot of sense, and frankly comes from a good business strategy. Anything that gives consumers a reason to consider getting a PlayStation over an Xbox, at the end of the day, is a win for the brand. Exclusives games are the best ticket to do so, especially when competitive hardware has very similar performance without the exclusive games. Any third-party game is going to be designed and optimized to run the same on every console its sold on, with the exception of PC, so exclusives hold a lot of weight.
The PS4 generation alone is evidence of this exclusive strategy paying off in droves. At first it was games like The Last of Us Remastered, which saw new life on PS4 after being one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time on PS3. Then it was titles like Infamous: Second Son and Bloodborne that set the expectations for what was to come on PS4. Then pretty much every subsequent exclusive surpassed those expectations: Ratchet & Clank, Uncharted 4, The Last Guardian, Marvel’s Spider-Man, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and many more. Even in 2020, both The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima highlighted the twilight of the PS4 quite well.
None of these exclusives would likely ever make it onto a competitor’s console, but they could be ported to the PC platform. With consoles the dynamic is different, as these are proprietary systems that are in direct competition with one another. PCs are far more ubiquitous, and aren’t in competition with other platforms because of their variety of usages outside of games. Anyone who owns a PC to play games generally ends up in two different camps; someone who feels they have no need for buying a gaming console, or someone who will primarily game on PC but play exclusives on the console of their choice.
This is why Sony would inherently benefit from porting its exclusive titles to PC over time. Of course, some would argue that there’s no point in porting exclusives to PC if gaming enthusiasts are just going to play all former PlayStation exclusives on PC. While theoretically that’s true, what Sony could do (and seems to be doing) is slowly port older titles on to PC over time. What this does is gives PC players the opportunity to hop into franchises not typically seen on PC, but also could encourage them to jump onto PS5 if a sequel is coming. Horizon Zero Dawn is a perfect example of this, as it allows PC players to get acquainted with the first game well, and simultaneously encourage them to get a PS5.
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This pseudo-FOMO strategy is an intelligent way to get PC players into the PlayStation ecosystem. Theoretically, anyone who purchases Horizon Zero Dawn on PC and enjoys it, is now more inclined to purchase a PS5 to play Horizon Forbidden West at launch. Granted there will be plenty of staunch PC loyalists or patient gaming fans who’ll be willing to wait in case the sequel is also ported. But the genius of porting games to PC is that it can encourage fans who would be happy to buy a PS5 if it means playing Zero Dawn‘s sequel earlier. While porting a game to PC isn’t exactly free money, it is a worthy investment that can only be positive for the brand.
Hopefully Sony takes the PC platform seriously and considers porting more PlayStation exclusives to PC. Not only does it breath new life into former PlayStation exclusives, but it can only encourage more fans to hop into the PlayStation ecosystem over time. There’s really not many downsides to porting games to PC, unless for some reason the port is prohibitively expensive to produce. So far, that hasn’t been a major problem from the Horizon port, so it PC fans should be optimistic for further PlayStation ports to PC.
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