PlayStation is going about its PC strategy all wrong

PlayStation understands it needs a presence on PC to survive in the long term. We’ve all been hearing from every source that game development costs are going up, but the price and number of people buying games aren’t. This is a dangerous cycle that only has two obvious solutions: increase the price of games (or monetize them in other ways) or expand your audience. PlayStation, like most companies, are attempting both. Its live-service initiative has yet to really kick off, but we can already see its struggles attempting to expand to PC players.

PlayStation has made its strategy fairly clear. Live-service games will come to PS5 and PC at the same time, while single-player games will be ported over a few years later. That not only makes perfect sense to me from a business perspective, but even from a consumer point of view. Live-service games need as large a playerbase as possible, while single-player games need to be of high quality and polish. Letting teams develop a game for just the PS5 allows them to focus on a single version of the game and later work on porting it instead of doing both at the same time. Where my issue comes up is in how Sony is trying to force PC players into its ecosystem with a stick rather than a carrot.

The PSN problem

The new “always online”

We learned during the State of Play that two more PlayStation titles would be coming to PC this year: God of War: Ragnarok and the Until Dawn remake. These are two fantastic experiences that are strictly single-player games. Despite that, both require PC players to have a PSN account in order to play them. With wounds still fresh from the Helldivers 2 PSN fiasco, I can’t help but wonder how PlayStation expects this requirement to go. A small group has already taken to review bombing the PS5 version on Metacritic since reviews on the Steam version won’t open until the game launches.

What confuses me the most about this requirement is how PlayStation already had the solution. Helldivers 2 was a problem because it didn’t require PSN accounts from the start. If it had, then the issue of people buying the game in regions where PSN wasn’t available wouldn’t exist. It would still be anti-consumer, but at least people wouldn’t have actually been at risk of losing a game they paid for. Thankfully Sony bit the bullet and allowed Helldivers 2 to continue on without that requirement. Ghost of Tsushima, which was released right on the heels of this controversy, seemed to have the perfect solution. It introduced a new overlay system where players could connect their PSN accounts to earn trophies, view their friends, and basically access all their PSN services on PC. The key here was that connecting your PSN was optional for everything but the multiplayer mode.

I assumed that would be the standard going forward. Multiplayer games would require PSN accounts to allow for crossplay, and single-player games would make it optional. Unfortunately, Sony is being too aggressive in trying to get PC players into the PSN ecosystem. Rather than making it appealing to create a free PSN account with some bonus cosmetic or extra goodies in the game, it decided to punish anyone who doesn’t want to (or legally can’t) make a PSN account.

The entire point of putting PlayStation games on PC (aside from making money, of course) is to try and bring as many of those players into the PlayStation ecosystem as possible. Most won’t buy a console right off the bat, but if they buy a couple of games and make a PSN account, it can be a slow play to eventually entice them onto the main platform when sequels come out they’d rather not wait another two years to play. This PSN requirement is a terrible first impression that we can already see is more likely to keep PC players away from buying anything PlayStation related than want to engage with it. PlayStation seems to think it holds all the power here, but gamers know when they’re being taken advantage of. Just like when single-player games force you to be online, we won’t stand for requirements that restrict our ability to play for a company’s sake.

If PlayStation wants to be successful in the PC space it needs to take a slow and consumer-friendly approach rather than coming at it with a hammer.

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