Sony’s PC learning curve hits an incline | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Now that Sony releasing its first-party titles on PC as well as PlayStation has become relatively commonplace, it’s easy to lose sight of what a major change in strategy this represents.

Since Sony entered the console market thirty years ago, it has devoted an immense amount of time, money, and focus to building up a studio system to deliver a steady flow of high-quality exclusive games for PlayStation platforms. It’s not a system without its flaws or occasional failures, but it’s arguably produced the most consistent and impressive studio portfolio any publisher in this industry has ever had – rivalling, if not surpassing, Nintendo’s also superb studio system.

The output of these studios is the beating heart of the PlayStation brand; the decision that their games should also launch on the PC, made a few years ago and now bearing regular fruit, is one of the biggest strategic shifts in the history of Sony as a games company.

In a sense, this is a case of the tail starting to wag the dog; Sony’s game studios, created and curated to provide the game pipeline that would cement PlayStation’s success in the console market, are now so successful that the company wants to find new commercial outlets for the games they create. This isn’t all that unusual in the business world, with perhaps the most famous example being Amazon creating cloud computing infrastructure to run its e-commerce site on, then realising it could make even more money by selling that infrastructure to everyone else, including its own competitors.

Sony knows that creating the expectation that its exclusive titles will end up on PC as well will have some impact on PlayStation hardware sales, and it has judged that this is acceptable in the face of the increased software sales it can achieve by porting its games across.

This really is new territory for Sony. Its past forays into PC publishing were largely confined to the MMORPG space, which it tentatively explored at a very distinct arm’s length from the