Sony PlayStation cross-platform game strategy

[DavidGraham]

Can you evidence a single game that was ported from console to PC in four months? Or six?

Death Stranding was released on PC in June 2020, followed quickly by Horizon Zero Dawn in August 2020 (guess what? they are the same engine!), a few months later we had Days Gone, followed by God Of War ina span of a few months too, followed swiftly by two Uncharted games: Uncharted 4 and Uncharted Lost Legacy (guess what? They are also the same engine), and in a few months we should have another exclusive, my guess is either Bloodborne, or Spiderman or even Ghost of Tsushima, then another one after that .. and so on.

Do you see the pattern here? In just to years we had siX PS4 exclusives (possibly more of Sony releases new titles before June 2022).

PS5 titles are going be even more easily portable, as they are using the same engines as previous installments, once the initial cost of porting is paid, it only gets much easier from there.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

What is even the argument being presented right now. It's clear Sony wants to put their software on pc

There's no argument right now, nor was there ever in this thread. No one denied Kotaku's initial report.

What's happening in this thread is one or two users straight up lying and making up statements about people "being in denial" at the beginning of this thread, to signal their self-manufactured vindication against an argument that never existed.

It's trolling, pure and simple. I reported it as such yesterday but the reports were ignored so far.
Anyone can go to the start of this thread and check that all those posts of people supposedly being "in denial" don't exist. And this was even called out earlier in the thread, but the narrative keeps being pushed for trolling purposes.

There was @Shifty Geezer and some others raising concerns about eventual PS5 games getting simultaneous releases and not being as optimized as usual for console hardware. Mostly because of the I/O transfer speeds requirements.
It's a valid concern IMO, but then again, there hasn't been either a simultaneous Playstation + PC release nor a port of a PS5 exclusive game. There's no vindication from people in denial there.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Death Stranding was released on PC in June 2020, followed quickly by Horizon Zero Dawn in August 2020 (guess what? they are the same engine!), a few months later we had Days Gone, followed by God Of War ina span of a few months too, followed swiftly by two Uncharted games: Uncharted 4 and Uncharted Lost Legacy (guess what? They are also the same engine), and in a few months we should have another exclusive, my guess is either Bloodborne, or Spiderman or even Ghost of Tsushima, then another one after that .. and so on.

Are you posting from the future? You talk about God of War and Uncharted like they released already. Anyway, I asked you for a list of games ports than took six-months-or-less work to port and provided zero. Good job man, well done.

505 Games did the port of Death Stranding (which is not a Sony first party game). 505 made $27m from that port, not Sony. This was a good port. Sony did the port of Horizon Zero Dawn. This was generally regarded as a bad port. Sony Bend did the port of Days Gone. This is generally regarded as a fair port. Sony Santa Monica are doing the port of God of War. TBC. Iron Galaxy are doing the ports of Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy. Also TBC.

PS5 titles are going be even more easily portable, as they are using the same engines as previous installments, once the initial cost of porting is paid, it only gets much easier from there.

Having an engine support multiple platforms is really the tip of the iceberg in terms of porting work. This is the reason good ports can take a year. PlayStation used a different shader format, different I/O stack and different low-level APIs. It also has a host Sony-exclusive middleware that have may been used. There's quite a lot that needs attention and ports will continue to be a resource-drain if Sony continue to use their internal teams to do this. Or a money drain is Sony task others to do this. Perhaps a happy middle-ground could be reached by splitting the cost of the efforts along with the profits.

 

[BRiT]

What is even the argument being presented right now. It's clear Sony wants to put their software on pc

It seems the discussion is now focused on the release cadence / schedule.

 

[PSman1700]

Mostly because of the I/O transfer speeds requirements.

IO/NVme performance wont be any problem on the pc. Were already at 7.5GB/s transfer speeds before directstore/rtx io kicks in.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

It seems the discussion is now focused on the release cadence / schedule.

For many, myself included, this was always the issue since the opening the of the thread. Some may wish to present the narrative that it was something else but the thing about written communication is that you can go back and read it and see what people said.

It'll never catch on.

 

[Inuhanyou]

It seems the discussion is now focused on the release cadence / schedule.

I see. If that's the case that I think it's pretty obvious Sony will continue to serve their console audience primarily with a staggered port window on PC until a hypothetical time in which they see consumers gradually moving away from their core hardware in general.

 

[DavidGraham]

Are you posting from the future? You talk about God of War and Uncharted like they released already. Anyway, I asked you for a list of games ports than took six-months-or-less work to port and provided zero. Good job man, well done.

And you are constantly dancing around the core issue, and putting new goal posts every once in a while, first it was impossible for Sony to break the PS4 brand, then the money isn't there, then porting is costly and slow. This is full on denial mode.

6 PS4 exclusives (or more) is released within a span of two years, that's before Nexxis joined Sony, imagine after that .. the pace will be accelerating, porting will be easier.

PlayStation used a different shader format, different I/O stack and different low-level APIs. It also has a host Sony-exclusive middleware that have may been used

PS4 has most of that, PS5 is still an X86 arch, most PS5 games are cross gen now, meaning they are releasing on PS4 as well, porting from PS4 is a solved problem, porting from PS5 will be a solved problem with the help of Nixxes. And yes that's the real reason in my opinion for their purchase. You presented zero reasons of why porting from PS5 is going to be anymore difficult than porting from PS4.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

And you are constantly dancing around the core issue, and putting new goal posts every once in a while, first it was impossible for Sony to break the PS4 brand, then the money isn't there, then porting is costly and slow. This is full on denial mode.

No, I'm really not. I'm saying now what I saying back on page 1. Literally read it yourself.

This will be huge if Sony begin to routinely release first party PS4 exclusives on Windows at the same time as the appear on PlayStation consoles.

But to address the other points, yes the majority of PlayStation's profits are derived from revenue from selling a lot of PlayStation consoles. This partly from services like PS+ and partly through licensing revenue generated by buying any game for PlayStation. Buy GTA V and Sony get a licensing fee. Buy Call of Duty, bang.. licensing feee. And often PS+ revenue. To keep PlayStation selling well Sony need to offer incentives that other platforms do not and part of that equation will be the appeal and timeliness of exclusive content.

Next, ports take a lot of time. Somebody said Nixxes pump out 2-3 games a year but it's actually more like one. That's quite a lot of engineering resource that could potentially be working on new IP that generates vastly more than a PC port would make. That's business. You don't chase any profit, you look to maximise the return on any investment.

Stop with the "denial" bullshit. Maybe some people said it wouldn't happen but I wasn't one of them.

You presented zero reasons of why porting from PS5 is going to be anymore difficult than porting from PS4.

I never said anything like this. Seriously, wtf?

 

[BRiT]

Can we please leave out the quips about 'denial mode' and the like? There's more interesting aspects to discuss than past posts (real or imagined).

 

[iroboto]

I see. If that's the case that I think it's pretty obvious Sony will continue to serve their console audience primarily with a staggered port window on PC until a hypothetical time in which they see consumers gradually moving away from their core hardware in general.

I'm going to stay out of this one. But I guess reading inbetween the lines, so far the only ported games have largely been PS4 titles. There seems to be an indirect discussion if we'll ever seen native PS5 titles ever show up on PC this generation or if whether that will only happen after PS6 happens.

I'm extrapolating here just sort of what I'm seeing. One group is readily saying it will happen. The other seems to disagree. I'm not really sure what the answer is; from experience I can only assume somewhere in the middle between the two end points.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I'm going to stay out of this one. But I guess reading inbetween the lines, so far the only ported games have largely been PS4 titles. There seems to be an indirect discussion if we'll ever seen native PS5 titles ever show up on PC this generation or if whether that will only happen after PS6 happens.

I'm staying out of this one he says diving it! I don't see any reason why games developed only for PS5 won't also get ported to Windows. I just don't think Sony will decide to release all games, and certainly not day and date on console. Unless the console market imposes in the future, which there are no signs of right now.

 

[iroboto]

I'm staying out of this one he says diving it! I don't see any reason why games developed only for PS5 won't also get ported to Windows. I just don't think Sony will decide to release all games, and certainly not day and date on console. Unless the console market imposes in the future, which there are no signs of right now.

lol. I'm trying to keep the peace, we are losing too many forum members at late, my subscriptions are going to be worthless soon. Basically I'm going to be writing to myself.

I think everyone understands that long term trajectory the future of Sony's revenue model may change, which is fair given a long enough period of time. On the flip side, waiting 10 years to say I told you so doesn't seem fair, everything is bound to change given a long enough period of time.

The only thing I've known as a constant from when I was born to today, is that change is the only thing that has been consistent. It's the only thing I have to prepare my children for really, how to deal with it because it's always happening.

So if people want to argue about whether PC will get day one PS5 exclusives, or just PS5 titles in general, they really should time bound it and bring forward evidence to back it or hold off until more evidence is displayed, otherwise this argument doesn't seem in good faith.

I mean, by the PS6 era I believe there will be PS5 titles on PC. So it's really just about counting backwards from there. And extrapolating at what point in time is it more profitable for Sony to release their games day one on PC or not. And if not, does it occur during the PS7 generation etc. All too long out there to bother to discuss.

 

[eastmen]

IO/NVme performance wont be any problem on the pc. Were already at 7.5GB/s transfer speeds before directstore/rtx io kicks in.

It's also interesting to note that the new horizon and god of war are on base ps4. So pc will easily fit between that and ultra inflated every planet aligns compression on the ps5 in terms of transfer rates. Not to mention the increase to ram size. If the trend of multiple years between console and pc release hold steady the first game that might fully take advantage of the ps5's transfer speed could be 4-5 years away from releasing on pc. As far as I know all the upcoming releases up until spiderman 2 are also ps4 games. Spiderman 2 is 2023. So we might not see that on pc until 2027.

So why are we even having a discussion on this. Like does anyone honestly believe that a console released in 2020 will even remotely compete with 2027 pc hardware ? Heck 2027 is long enough that almost everyone today will have upgraded their computers at least once , even die hards who keep laptops and stuff to the bitter end will be entering the upgrade cycle and pc gamers would most likely have upgraded twice.

Even if we move up the time frame the earliest spiderman 2 will hit pc is what 2024 /25 We will have at least another generation most likely just launching a second generation newer hardware than the rdna 2 inside the ps5 and what 3-4 generations newer than zen 2 for the cpu side. We already see stuff like v cache for the cpu and infinty cache for the gpu on the amd side. We have direct io coming , pci-e 5 and 6. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time spiderman 2 hit we have some nvme ssds that are very close to the raw speed of the playstation ssd's compression

At the end of the day the ps5 is a fixed point in time which was 2020. Somethings they were able to do well with like the speed of the ssd , somethings they did poorly with like the gpu. But its not going to change. The hardware continues to age while new pc hardware keeps getting released. This is true for all consoles.

For sony its in their best interest to port playstation games over. once they give sony the boost to ps5 they want its just all extra money for them which allows them to make more and better games in the future. Playstation fans should be extremely happy

 

[iroboto]

For sony its in their best interest to port playstation games over. once they give sony the boost to ps5 they want its just all extra money for them which allows them to make more and better games in the future. Playstation fans should be extremely happy

The most straight forward answer here is that Sony will release ports when profit is maximized. If eventually that leads to day one releases on PC, then it will become; corporations all share a trait in greed over customer loyalty.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

There seems to be an indirect discussion if we'll ever seen native PS5 titles ever show up on PC this generation or if whether that will only happen after PS6 happens.

PS5 ports of non-crossgen games will probably come when sales of said games become residual in Sony's consoles. In some cases like Ratchet&Clank, it'll happen when Sony is comfortable enough asking for a fast SSD as minimum requirement (e.g. when enough people have a PCIe 4.0 SSD in their gaming PC?), as well as enough leftover CPU power to replace the console's dedicated I/O.


Regardless, looking at Jim Ryan's latest interviews it's a matter of "when", not "if".

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I think everyone understands that long term trajectory the future of Sony's revenue model may change, which is fair given a long enough period of time. On the flip side, waiting 10 years to say I told you so doesn't seem fair, everything is bound to change given a long enough period of time.

The only thing I've known as a constant from when I was born to today, is that change is the only thing that has been consistent. It's the only thing I have to prepare my children for really, how to deal with it because it's always happening.

Sony's revenue seems to change every generation. But what isn't constant is any specific change. Sony will try things, invest in it and if it doesn't yield good results, drop it pretty quickly. Toward the end of the PS2-era Sony had some success with SOCOM which were some of the really popular online games for PS2. This made Sony invest in more online exclusives for PS3 like War Hawk and MAG, which didn't do so well so Sony walked that experiment right back, turning back to focus more on single-player games.

I'm happy have to stick to evidence and fact-based discussions and the facts are Sony have said we're experimenting with this. That's all you can bank on. Sony's financials will show how well their PC port business is doing and we can watch those each quarter. Whilst the PC port of Death Stranding made 505 Games $27m in 2020 I've yet to see any blip on Sony's financials from PC games having released HZD and Days Gone so it doesn't look like these even popular games are making that much of an impact. I can see God of War and Uncharted potentially being key test cases as both are long-standing franchises that probably have a lot of appeal. Horizon and Days Gone - currently - are still not IP that is well known outside of the console space.

 

[DavidGraham]

Next, ports take a lot of time.

Again, 6+ ports in two years is a pretty good number. Nobody even dreams of having more than that. Nixxes is either going to increase that number or maintain it, and as others have pointed out in this thread, Nixxes is a pretty big commitment from Sony indeed.

I am not even counting small efforts, like the small title that made the cut to PC, the multiplayer game called "ReadySet Heroes", published directly by Sony.

A second Sony published title also made it's way to PC, it's called "Predator: Hunting Grounds"

MLB The Show and Tetris Effect broke exclusivity to both PCs and Xbox.

 

[Deleted member 2197]

I'm extrapolating here just sort of what I'm seeing. One group is readily saying it will happen. The other seems to disagree. I'm not really sure what the answer is; from experience I can only assume somewhere in the middle between the two end points.

If we could all foretell the future we wouldn't have any disagreements. Since we can't, "agree to disagree" until more information is forthcoming. Shouldn't take any longer than a year or two.

 

[PSman1700]

So if people want to argue about whether PC will get day one PS5 exclusives, or just PS5 titles in general, they really should time bound it and bring forward evidence to back it

That goes both ways, ofcoure. Theres zero evidence that Sony wont be putting more Sony games on (be it PS5, PS4 or PS6 if that ever comes). On the contrary, Sony themselfs say they are very much into bring over PS exclusives to PC. They even aquired a dedicated studio to aid in the porting processes. I see it very much possible that PS5 games will see PC releases before the PS6 is here (if that one happens, then). PS4 exclusives did make it to the PC before the PS5 saw its release date.

If the trend of multiple years between console and pc release hold steady the first game that might fully take advantage of the ps5's transfer speed could be 4-5 years away from releasing on pc.

Like does anyone honestly believe that a console released in 2020 will even remotely compete with 2027 pc hardware ?

Absolutely true. But even if Sony wanted to release Rift Apart today on pc, i dont think that would be all that much of a problem. The hardware is there that outmatches the PS5's IO on pc. Adoption isnt all that huge yet (but so isnt the PS5 as a console vs the PS4), but then again, Rift Apart doesnt even seem to need much of a monster SSD anyway. Most serious pc gamers have PCIE3 nvme setups now anyway, direct storage did become a W10 feature afterall, so i dont see much need for concern hardware/software wise. Next gen games arent going to be anything for older pc's anyway. Aside from that, the PS5 is basically a mid-end 2019 pc hardware wise.

For sony its in their best interest to port playstation games over.

Yea, thats why they are doing so right now, and boosting it by aquiring a dedicated studio for that sole reason. Some claimed GoW would never see a pc release not all that long ago. Yet here we are.

If we could all foretell the future we wouldn't have any disagreements. Since we can't, "agree to disagree" until more information is forthcoming. Shouldn't take any longer than a year or two.

Yes i dont get what the problem is, Sony themselfs clearly stated multiple times they are going to bring PS exclusives over to PC. Its not more to it than that. And thats going to be certainly more then just some PS4 games, they aquired Nixxes some months ago (juli 2021). Clearly thats going to work out for PS5 ports aswell. it just happens to be a sensitive matter, somehow. PS games have historically never seen PC ports like this, its something of the modern and future-sony. Nothing wrong with that, the company is just expanding beyond the playstation hardware to reach a broader, much larger market.

Also, to clarify again, Nixxes is aquired to help in porting over PS games to PC, this is stated in multiple articles according to Sony's statements.

https://screenrant.com/playstation-games-pc-ports-nixxes-studio/

https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2021/07/28/nixxes-pc-ports/

Jim Ryan Confirms Nixxes Acquisition Was to Help Port PlayStation Titles to PC