PlayStation 5 games have been ported to PC since the start of the generation with fantastic games like Spider-Man Remastered, God of War: Ragnarok, and Horizon: Forbidden West all coming to the platform. While multiplayer games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokon are coming to the platform, single-player games are reportedly not.
This all stems from a recent report by extremely trusted games journalist Jason Schreier who claimed that Sony sees games releasing on PC as “damaging [to] the console’s brand” while “hurting sales of the PlayStation 5”. However, former Bluepoint employee Peter Dalton has their own take.
Dalton, who worked as the head of technology at Bluepoint until its shutdown by Sony, explained that PlayStation may now see the success of Valve’s Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine as a threat to its console market. With Valve’s push into both a handheld and console form factor, the PC now has its own “console ecosystem” that can be deemed a competitor.
“It would be quite ironic if, after decades of traditional console competition, Valve ultimately ended up winning the console war.”
Bluepoint head of technology Peter Dalton
The Bluepoint developer explained that some have framed Sony’s anti-PC push “as a response to Xbox” as Microsoft’s next-gen console will be a PC with a Xbox UI. However, Dalton believes the rise of Valve in the hardware space is likely the real culprit.
“A more interesting possibility is the rise of a Steam-based console ecosystem,” the developer said. “Consoles largely exist because they provide a cheaper, simpler alternative to gaming PCs. For most households, a dedicated gaming console is easier to justify than building or maintaining a high-end PC.”
The developer explained that offering players a console-like experience with access to the entire PC ecosystem with the strong consumer reputation Valve has is essentially a death sentence for any competitor that isn’t Nintendo.
“If Valve releases a new Steam console that provides a console-like experience while still giving players access to the entire PC game library, that could become a very compelling option,” he said. “In that scenario, if Sony were releasing all of its games day-and-date on PC, the Steam console could effectively offer the best of all worlds: console simplicity with the full breadth of PC gaming.”
They concluded: “It would be quite ironic if, after decades of traditional console competition, Valve ultimately ended up winning the console war.”
While Valve’s handheld and upcoming console-like PC can’t play every game due to anti-cheat gubbins, they are competitors. Sure, the Steam Deck is less powerful than a PS5, but it can play almost every game a PS5 can, including most first-party games. The upcoming Steam Machine will also be able to play any PS5 games, and even outperform the base model in some cases due to a larger RAM pool and a faster CPU. So, with more games available, why would anyone buy a PlayStation 5?
We won’t know for sure if Valve’s hardware is the true cause of Sony pulling away from PC unless the company directly addresses it, but it could be one reason. Bloomberg’s report suggests that backlash against mandatory PlayStation Network accounts, review bombs, and inconsistent releases could also be just one reason behind the new exclusive move.
Despite this, the PC ecosystem is still more active than its ever been with most games now releasing with PC as their target platform, and some even targeting Steam Deck as a minimum spec machine. While PlayStation may not want to participate, the platform is now the go-to platform for most gamers with many games selling more copies on PC than both PlayStation and Xbox combined.
