There’s a particular kind of gamer you’ve probably met. Maybe you are that gamer. They’ve built a PC that runs games at framerates consoles can’t dream of, with resolutions that make your eyes water in the best possible way. And they’ve been perfectly happy to wait. Wait a year. Sometimes longer. Because they know that eventually, they’ll play God of War or The Last of Us the way it was always meant to be experienced.
Sony might be telling those people: you’re done waiting, because the wait is over. There’s nothing coming.
According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, whose track record in this industry is about as reliable as it gets, Sony is pulling back from releasing its single-player exclusives on PC. This is not officially confirmed yet. But Schreier was unambiguous: this is “not speculation,” and more reporting is coming. The gaming world has been buzzing ever since. And honestly? The more you think about it, the worse it looks for Sony.
The Money Doesn’t Lie But Sony Might Be Misreading It
Here’s what’s genuinely baffling. Sony isn’t losing money on PC ports. Not even close. Cumulatively, their first-party PC releases have pulled in over $4.2 billion. The Ghost of Tsushima port reportedly broke even within two hours of launch. That’s an excellent revenue stream.
The counter-argument Sony seems to be making internally is one of proportion. PC brought in around $650 million in one fiscal year, but that’s only about 3.4% of PlayStation Store’s total revenue. So in the grand spreadsheet of Sony’s empire, PC is a rounding error. Why bother?
- $650 million isn’t a rounding error to the people making those ports.
- It’s not a rounding error to the studios that funded it.
- And it’s certainly not a rounding error to the PC players who spent that money.
Dismissing profitable revenue because it’s a small percentage of something enormous is the kind of thinking that gets companies into trouble.
There’s also the sequel problem, which Sony seems to be weighing heavily. First entries in franchises, the original God of War, the first Spider-Man, The Last of Us Part I, did great on PC. Sequels? Noticeably less so. Sony’s reading of this: PC players sample franchises cheaply without committing. They dip in, enjoy the ride, and don’t follow through.
Here’s another interpretation nobody at Sony seems to be considering. What if the sequel underperforms on PC because the gap between releases is too long? What if the problem isn’t the platform. It’s the strategy of trickling games out a year or more after console launch, by which point the cultural conversation has moved on?
The Myth That Exclusivity Sells Consoles
Let’s be generous and consider Sony’s position for a moment, because it deserves a fair hearing.
The traditional argument goes like this: exclusive games are the reason people buy consoles. If you can play Sony’s best games on PC, why buy a PS5? By keeping games off PC, Sony protects the value of its hardware. More consoles sold means more PlayStation Plus subscribers, more PlayStation Store purchases, more ecosystem lock-in. The PC port revenue is sacrificed for something bigger.
It’s a coherent argument. It’s how this industry operated for decades.
Withholding a game from PC does not make high-end PC owners buy a PlayStation. It makes them play something else. These aren’t people who are one exclusive away from switching platforms. They’ve invested thousands into their rigs. They have Game Pass. They have Steam libraries with hundreds of games. They have an entire ecosystem that isn’t going anywhere. Pulling Death Stranding 3 from PC doesn’t push them to a couch with a DualSense. It pushes them to whatever’s next on their wishlist.
Sony would need unmissable games to make exclusivity a real option. The PS3 era gave us Uncharted, The Last of Us, God of War (the original run), LittleBigPlanet, inFamous, Gran Turismo and many more… all in one generation. The current PlayStation lineup has produced high-quality work, sure. But the sheer density of must-play experiences has thinned. You need extraordinary games to make people change platforms. Right now, Sony doesn’t have enough of them.
Then There’s Xbox. Doing the Opposite, Also Struggling
The irony of all this is almost poetic. While Sony tightens its grip, Xbox has spent years doing the exact opposite:
- Putting everything on PC day-and-date
- Moving major franchises to PS5
- Turning itself into a multiplatform publisher. Forza. Halo. Gears of War. All heading to PlayStation.
You’d think Sony retreating from PC would be a gift to Microsoft. On paper, it should be. Xbox’s “play anywhere” philosophy suddenly looks principled and forward-thinking by comparison.
Except Xbox is in its own WTH moment:
- Phil Spencer has retired
- Sarah Bond has stepped down
- Game Pass prices have surged
- Hardware sales have cratered
Xbox is doing the right thing for players in many ways but they’re struggling to make anyone care about Xbox as a platform. When you can get everything on PlayStation or PC anyway, why own the box?
Both companies, in their own ways, are undermining the very thing that made them worth choosing. Sony is becoming more restrictive when openness was building goodwill. Xbox is becoming so open that the hardware feels redundant.
Unless Xbox will be a way to get a cheaper gaming computer as it is supposed to be more Windows-ish.
The winners, quietly, are Nintendo and PC.
Death Stranding and the Players Left Behind
Take Death Stranding as a case study because it’s the game that crystallises all of this so perfectly.
Hideo Kojima’s strange, melancholy game about a courier reconnecting a broken America arrived on PS4 in November 2019. It came to PC eight months later. The sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, launched on PS5 in June 2025. Critics adored it. VGC named it their Game of the Year 2025. It arrives on PC on March 19, 2026. Ported lovingly by Nixxes Software, with unlocked framerates, ultrawide support, and all the trimmings.
This is exactly the kind of game that has a devoted PC audience. Slow, thoughtful, visually stunning, best experienced at maximum fidelity. Those players waited.
If Sony’s new strategy had been in place, they simply wouldn’t get it.
And Nixxes, the studio Sony owns specifically to make great PC ports, suddenly has an uncertain future. If the single-player titles stop flowing, what does Nixxes do? It’s one of the most uncomfortable subplots in all of this.
Why This Hits Different Right Now
There’s something emotionally real underneath all the business analysis. Something that resonates beyond console wars and quarterly earnings.
Gaming has always been, at its core, about inclusion. About making worlds accessible. The history of the medium is one long, imperfect arc toward more people being able to play more things.
- Handhelds so you could play on the go
- Backwards compatibility so your library doesn’t vanish
- PC ports so that people who can’t afford, or simply don’t want, multiple devices can still experience the best games.
When a company decides to restrict access based not on technical limitations but on platform strategy, it feels like a step backward on that arc.
Sony’s reported decision, if it holds, is a reminder that the relationship between a platform holder and a player is always transactional.
We’ve always known this. For many, it still stings a little when they’re reminded.
