Sony Group Corp. had been planning to release its big Playstation 5 games on PC, in keeping with its policy of doing multi-platform releases as it has over the past six years. They’ve decided to stop doing this, and they are pulling back internally developed releases to being Playstation 5 only. Powerful competition from Valve’s Steam Machine and Steam Deck may driving this decision in part, as PC gaming is now bleeding over into the console marketplace.

This makes sense to us. If you’ve ever had the chance to compare Playstation versions, the fifth machine is dramatically faster than its predecessor and features raytracing, but pales in comparison to a relatively pedestrian gamer PC in terms of both computing power and available titles. The hardware improvements were a temporary blip in the face of aggressive and continuous advancement in general purpose computing, so roping back their content is their only viable option. Sales of Playstation games on PC haven’t been stellar anyway, so distributing Playstation games this way is probably doing more harm than good.

Online games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokon will still be released across multiple platforms, because they have to be to get enough market share. PlayStation, though, has recently scrapped operations related to bringing other internally developed games to PC, including the smash hit Ghost of Yotei and other internally developed games. Playstation is still planning to release Death Stranding 2 and Kena: Scars of Kosmora for PC later this year, but each of these is being externally developed and only distributed by Playstation.

It wasn’t until 2020 that Playstation started issuing titles to PC via Steam. This brought some of their biggest franchises, such as The Last of Us and God of War, to the personal computer. These two titles have brought them good fortune in the marketplace, to be sure, but they have also middied the waters with respect to Playstation brand recognition. The company hasn’t been consistent about their choices of which titles deserved a multi-platform release either, and have generally ticking off players by asking them to create Playstation Network accounts to play many of the games. Now Sony is just wiping the strategy whiteboard clean and starting over, with the simplest, cleanest marketing decision they could make: they’re going back to platform exclusives.

Though it reduces the availability of the games in general terms from a player’s perspective, we applaud this from a business standpoint. It’s the smart move. If what drives your platform sales is your content, it makes little sense to let that content wander into other people’s front yards.