My guess is this is because of legacy thinking from publishers. They spent so many years with the notion that games sell most on consoles that its gonna require some time to move from that. In the last 3 years PC exploded mightily and the biggest games routinely sell the most on PC. Since Cyberpunk doing most of its load on PC, we've had 3 singleplayer games crack steam's top 10 CC. Games where we have data, like Elden Ring selling near 50% of its total on steam. Diablo 4 sold near 70% on PC, with ps5 at 20% and xbox at 4% i think. Then, in absence of platform specific numbers, we can make educated guesses based on steam's CC number and the total sales from publishers. Dying Light 2 most likely also sold half on PC. RE4 remake also likely sold half on PC. Hogwarts Legacy has very similar numbers to Elden Ring - half of its total on PC again. The recent Armored Core probably also half. The game surprisingly is nr 73 of all time on steam. From also took great care of the version after Elden Ring sold more on PC than every console sku combined. Hopefully they maintain it in the future. Baldurs Gate 3 very likely exceeded 10 million copies sold on steam. It got so big that Spencer advertised Starfield with the CC number of players, after BG3 had its impressive run.
The only thing i see happening in the future is PC demolishing consoles even harder than it already does, as its user number continues to grow year after year, while consoles have the same numbers as 20 years ago. Certainly not sony carving jack shit or PC being thrown to the side
Interesting that you think PC is exploding. Depending on the publisher it's slightly up, slightly down, or basically the split as it was years ago.
For example, UBIsoft PC share.
- 2018-2019: 27%
- 2019-2020: 26%
- 2020-2021: 23%
- 2021-2022: 26%
- 2022-2023: 18%
That's certainly not exploding.
The same goes for ABK with revenue split between console and PC basically being the same as it has been for the past 5 years. Consoles dominate for Activision while PC dominates for Blizzard. So, again, not exploding.
CDPR was historically a PC only developer. They only started releasing on consoles starting with Xbox with TW2, the both consoles starting with TW3. Unsurprisingly they sell better on PC than consoles due to their fanbase being mostly PC players. Ditto for Diablo, again it's a PC title that happens to now also get released on consoles.
Elden Ring as well as the Souls games are certainly good examples of a console developer doing well on PC. The difficulty of the games is likely the big attraction for PC gamers. That is definitely an outlier.
Oh and Dying Light 2? The last breakdown I saw had it at 12% of sales for the PC version. This was for Mar. 2022, so perhaps it went on to sell massively better on PC after that?
So, yes there are some few games that sell better on PC than on console. I've generally pointed out when that happens. For example, you missed another big title that sold better on PC, Doom (another historically PC dominated IP). In general, however, the majority of AAA titles sell better on console than PC.
We're at a point where if you are a AAA developer you basically have to release on all the platforms that you can if you want to survive. But unless you are a PC first developer (very rare) the PS5 will be getting the most optimization effort from AAA developers because that's generally the platform they will sell the most games on and/or the platform they are the most familiar with (From Software, for example will still optimize more heavily for PS5 than PC just because they are a Japanese developer).
Regards,
SB
