The Novelty of PlayStation's PC Ports Does Appear to Be Dampening | Push Square

pushsquare.com:

God of War Ragnarok has released to a robust but rather unremarkable 25k concurrent players on Steam. That number is fluctuating and is likely to increase further over the weekend, but it’s a huge decline compared to the original God of War’s much more impressive peak of 73k concurrent players. It shows that the novelty of Sony’s late ports is starting to wear off.

Your ultimate 100% completion guide for God of War Ragnarok

To be fair, Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut did buck the trend earlier this year, debuting with 77k concurrent players – a record for a PS Studios first-party port, beaten only by Helldivers 2, which launched simultaneously on PC with PS5. Generally, though, Sony’s big sequel ports are selling worse than their predecessors: Horizon Forbidden West registered a peak of 40k concurrent players compared to Horizon Zero Dawn’s high of 56k; Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales managed a peak of just 13k concurrent players compared to Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered’s 66k.

It should be noted that concurrent players don’t give us the full sales picture: they merely tell us how many Steam users have the game open at a specific point in time. But generally a higher number of concurrent players means more sales; earlier this year Black Myth: Wukong posted some mind-blowing concurrent players statistics, which were accompanied by some outstanding sales figures.

We suppose one issue here is the platform holder’s insistence of demanding a PSN login, which is restricting its more recent games from being sold in hundreds of countries. While we understand its decision to mandate a login, it really needs to ensure PSN is readily available in more regions, because it’s needlessly preventing people from purchasing its games as a result.

But it does feel like, in general, the novelty is wearing off for PS Studios on PC, which we suppose is to be expected after the initial wave of releases. Ultimately, Sony will simply be satisfied with reaching a new audience and