Granted im a pc only guy and only care about God of War, if I was running Nintendo, Xbox or Playstation, having exclusives on the platform im working for just makes it a no brainer. I would probably have done the same thing. However, its gonna be a bummer for many of us who only PC game now. But this decision wont be permanent is my guess.

Yeah they should totally copy Microsoft's playbook. Increase your PC share and fuck your core platform up. Brilliant strategy. May as well advise Nintendo to do the same.

Which singleplayer Microsoft titles beside Forza Horizon sold more on PC than Sony's top stuff anyway? Seems to me that Sony's late and expensive ports somehow still managed to sell more than any day and date singleplayer MS game that isn't Forza Horizon, which by extension means much greater revenues, since Sony's promotions aren't as frequent or aggressive.

PC was intended as "bonus" revenue stream for Sony. So not copying the garbage that Microsoft does made perfect sense and is why Playstation is still going very strong and Xbox is in the mud.

"PC day n date won't hurt console performance! GamePass will increase hardware and software sales!!! Microsoft's pro-gamerism is the way!!!! Series S is the best value in gaming!!! Better Together!! Series S and X cover everything!!! Phil is a genius!!!"

Xbox:
https://youtube.com/shorts/PjUqsWr2Iac?si=SZwbclnTyfqmJaGj

If the the sales on PC are "negligible" then what is all this "brand damage" people are talking about? It does not appear that PlayStation owners are jumping to PC en masse so the brand damage claim doesn't hold much water--at least for now. They might be worried about people skipping PS6 if supplies are stressed for a long period.

As for PC sales declining, it should be noted that Sony did a poor job retaining PC customers with all the problems users have experienced. Keep screwing up and people are going to avoid buying your product. A good portion of that is on them.

Related to that, I think one issue in particular is a big part of this decision. Sony was probably counting on bringing people into their ecosystem with mandatory PSN accounts on PC. That absolutely did NOT play out the way they wanted. Terrible planning on their part and they have no one blame but themselves but my guess is that was one of the factors that made them go the PC path in the first place. Corporations do love showing off registered user numbers to investors.

Personally, I don't really care. There might be Sony games that I want to play but new releases take so long and there are so few of them now that I just can't imagine buying a console when PC has so much to choose from.

As primarily PC focused gamer, I'm fine with it.

I haven't bought PS5 exactly because they started porting their exclusives to PC, and although there isn't really much that Sony makes that I want to play, there are still enough that justifies having their console for those exclusives, if they go back to releasing their titles on PS consoles only.

I think it's long term damage. PS5 has kept up with PS4 aligned sales so far. Sometimes things you do in one generation don't really show up until the next. 

PC Gamers are surprisingly picky for a bunch of people that are happy to own everything digitally. All the complaining about needing to make a PSN account is just silly. 

A 20% increase in overall 1st party software revenue due to PC support is a negligible gain compared to a 5% customer loss caused by PC support. If Sony concludes from the data they have that 5% or higher of players already left Playstation because of PC, then it only makes sense that they dial back on it.

For every lost Playstation customer, they'd be losing thousands of dollars per generation. The long term implications are serious.

This has nothing to do with pokoko you were quoting, just about your last paragraph he touched on the PSN account issue.

Aside from the PC Master Race joke that some take as being a real representation of themselves, it's common to find people that goes as far to say that even if a game is free on Epic (which is a huge storefront and not a niche one) they still rather wait for a sale to buy it on Steam.

Some of the PC only crowd will avoid a game if it isn't on Steam. Just as much if not more loyalists that the console only crowd.

Finding issue with having to create a free PSN account to play all games from Sony on PC is beyond silly, and that becomes even sillier and a lot of them already have accounts for other devs, like Blizzard for Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, etc; Microsoft for Forza Horizon and Halo; Rockstar for GTA and Red Dead Redemption and many others, but boy oh boy how dare a Sony game asks you for a PSN account.

Sadly, some PC-Only people are pretty hypocritical. Steam deck was a fair price at launch for $400-$650, but Switch 2 isn't at $450? Locking a game down to be exclusive to a console is anti-consumer, but locking a game down with Denuvo isn't? Having multiple launchers and accounts is fine, until Sony asks for one? 

Wasn't the main issue that PSN coverage wasn't worldwide, thus locking some people out of playing their games at all?

5% customer loss?  What are you talking about, exactly?  Because they will lose and gain customers regardless.  You're saying that have some way to know that 5% of customers are moving to PC specifically for this reason?  

It's not at all unreasonable to deduce that a 5%+ loss was caused by lack of true exclusives, in addition to other percentages caused by other factors. You were talking as if a "negligible" increase of software sales caused by PC translates to a negligible decrease on the console side, which isn't necessarily true. Sony has access to more data than we do, and the data is helping them arrive at different conclusions that may or may not be misguided.

And while we're at it, why aren't Valve putting their most popular games on consoles and other PC storefronts? Why are paid exclusives still a thing? Exclusives do obviously matter, even smaller ones to an extent. The longer and truer they are, the more value added to the platform.

In my mind, the primary reason Xbox collapsed was its complete lack of exclusives which over time virtually everyone knew about.