Report: Sony single player games exclusive again

[weirdfeline]

It's been rumored for a week or two now that Sony is going to make their single player games exclusive once again, Jason Schreier is now confirming this in Bloomberg.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-04/sony-pulls-back-from-playstation-games-on-pc

Ghost of Yotei will not receive a PC port nor will the upcoming Saros. This seems to be limited to first party games because Death Stranding 2 and Kena 2 are both coming to PC.

Online multiplayer games/live service games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls will still be released for PC.

Apparently they are concerned this will hurt console sales if they continue to release on PC, uhhh duh?

Clearly the real reason for this sudden change is that they are mad they don't have a valid reason to shut down Nixxes so they are creating a reason to.

[juanblue85]

Dang its going to suck when Horizon 3 is finally announced and its only going to be for PS5. Dang shame they never released Uncharted Nathan Drake Collection on PC as we only got Legacy of Thieves one.

[bikingjahuty]

I don't pretend to be an industry expert or insider, but it seems like releasing AAA games exclusively for a single platform is no longer a financially viable option. Sure, I don't think Sony should be releasing their first party games on XBOX or Switch 2, but that PC market is expanding and already pretty large. Even if you maintain console exclusivity for a year or so, it's better than never releasing them on PC ever, at least from a financial standpoint.


In a way, I do get where Sony is coming from with this as well. More and more gamers are moving away from consoles entirely, which is obviously bad news for the companies making consoles. We all know XBOX's future is complete toast, however I'm sure Microsoft hardly cares since all the PC gamers are gaming on Windows machines anyways. Nintendo is sort of its own ecosystem and experience, mostly separate from what Sony and Microsoft have been doing for the last two decades. That leaves Sony who's sort of the last man standing. However, I think Sony has really dropped the ball this last gen with making the PS5 a meaningful purchase for exclusive experiences. I remember every previous console having a ton of exclusives, both first and third party. The PS5 however has been mostly lacking in this department with most of its games being multiplats, even when disregarding what's also on the PC.


I guess this just all highlights how precarious the game industry is right now. I read a few weeks ago that something like a third of all game industry employees have been laid off since like 2022 or something. There are other signs the industry is just not healthy at the moment either. I've said this before, but I feel like the whole AAA game model has become somewhat unsustainable. Sure, it works out incredibly well if your game is a mega hit, but if it's anything less than that, your studio faces imminent closure. I think these bigger studios needs to focus more on less expensive, AA games, or even budget games made by small, talented teams. I feel like this would work better than putting all your eggs in one basket and betting the farm on a single game.


Anyhow, now I'm going off on a tangent. But yeah, I don't think it's feasible for Sony to make their first party games exclusive despite me seeing the motivation to do so.

[ssj4yamgeta]

Let 'em. Sony's 1st-party studios don't make a single thing that interests me anymore. The only thing they had was Stellar Blade, but that's going independent now that Shift-Up can afford to self-publish. I lost interest in Horizon after they made Aloy canonically lesbian in the Burning Shores DLC for Forbidden West, a baffling move that had no relevance to the plot and served no purpose other than to push an agenda. Everything else they make is nearly-identical 3rd-person over the shoulder open world slop with the same gameplay loop. First-party exclusives really have become the new shovelware, along with most of what the AAA devs put out these days.

[sworddude]

Hard to say, it works for nintendo for sure, they would lose mad money in the longrun if they where to release their games on pc aswell.

if the games are really good people would be forced to get a console and get in their system instead of buying it for cheap on pc.

game prices are generally higher on console than on pc.

Problem with sony is that they have not been consistent in terms of exclusivity anymore so it would need to be something really longterm for it to pay off again and they would need to stick with it.

[dhaabi]

Let 'em. Sony's 1st-party studios don't make a single thing that interests me anymore. The only thing they had was Stellar Blade, but that's going independent now that Shift-Up can afford to self-publish. I lost interest in Horizon after they made Aloy canonically lesbian in the Burning Shores DLC for Forbidden West, a baffling move that had no relevance to the plot and served no purpose other than to push an agenda. Everything else they make is nearly-identical 3rd-person over the shoulder open world slop with the same gameplay loop. First-party exclusives really have become the new shovelware, along with most of what the AAA devs put out these days.

Yet, Stellar Blade is another third-person action-adventure game albeit one that panders to the male gaze with one-dimensional, overt objectification for no purpose other than that sex sells.

Nevertheless, what kinds of games published by Sony from earlier generations do you like that you think has been abandoned in more recent years? It's not an uncommon opinion you're presenting, but I'm curious since I don't often see people actually elaborate on their view.

[sworddude]

Let 'em. Sony's 1st-party studios don't make a single thing that interests me anymore. The only thing they had was Stellar Blade, but that's going independent now that Shift-Up can afford to self-publish. I lost interest in Horizon after they made Aloy canonically lesbian in the Burning Shores DLC for Forbidden West, a baffling move that had no relevance to the plot and served no purpose other than to push an agenda. Everything else they make is nearly-identical 3rd-person over the shoulder open world slop with the same gameplay loop. First-party exclusives really have become the new shovelware, along with most of what the AAA devs put out these days.

Yet, Stellar Blade is another third-person action-adventure game albeit one that panders to the male gaze with one-dimensional, overt objectification for no purpose other than that sex sells.

Nevertheless, what kinds of games published by Sony from earlier generations do you like that you think has been abandoned in more recent years? It's not an uncommon opinion you're presenting, but I'm curious since I don't often see people actually elaborate on their view.

Stellarblade perhaps went a bit over the top but there ain't anything wrong with making your characters look good besides they where trying to replicate said model the used for her and I think they did a good job. allot of modern western games make female characters ugly or very manly looking these days in which they get backlash from the community. stellarblade gave the finger to that trend hence why people often go to it.

In general asian studio's seem to ignore that trend. It seems to be a checkbox for western game development.

for example this is how rainbow six did 2B nier dlc





This was a super meme example looks nothing like 2B at all looks like an actual man cosplaying as 2B

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TZN0LhdZoI

[ssj4yamgeta]

Yet, Stellar Blade is another third-person action-adventure game albeit one that panders to the male gaze with one-dimensional, overt objectification for no purpose other than that sex sells.

Nevertheless, what kinds of games published by Sony from earlier generations do you like that you think has been abandoned in more recent years? It's not an uncommon opinion you're presenting, but I'm curious since I don't often see people actually elaborate on their view.

And that's a good thing. Overtly sexy women are a welcome change after 10+ years of deliberately ugly designs being pumped out by the western games industry to avoid offending psychologically fragile women. One-dimensional characters work just fine as video game protagonists in anything that isn't a movie game or a JRPG. Link, Leon S. Kennedy, Raiden (MGS series), Doomguy, (Pre-Reboot) Lara Croft, Mario, Donkey Kong, and Dante are all one-dimensional but still beloved video game protagonists. I could list even more if I wanted to. They work because video games are fundamentally different from film or books by virtue of being games. The purpose of a game is to be fun. A game doesn't need to tell a deep story to be fun. The protagonist is just a digital meat suit the player puts on to interact with the environment. They don't need to be deep. Leon and Raiden in particular were designed for the female gaze. Raiden only exists because Kojima was told by a high school girl that Snake was unattractive and she wanted a younger, cuter protagonist in the next game. His cyborg redesigns in MGS4 and Rising are blatant femboy fetish pandering, just look at the high heels built into his cyborg body. It was even more obvious in his first design for Metal Gear Solid: Rising before it was handed over to Platinum and became Rising: Revengeance. Yet the female gaze is fine, according to the industry. I'm really sick of being told that women can have attractive one-dimensional male characters, but men are evil for wanting attractive one-dimensional female characters.

The most damaging thing gamers ever did was trying to get video games recognized as art. After that movement took off, wannabe filmmakers flooded the industry and now everything has to be an interactive movie. Can a movie game be done right? Absolutely, Mafia: The Old Country is a great example of such. It's quick, well-acted, and to the point. But more often than not it's a detriment to the game, such as Hellblade 2's opening where you spend 30-45 minutes just running forward, Red Dead Redemption 2's pointless chores and long, unskippable skinning animations, and The Metal Gear Solid series' excessively long infodumps (especially MGS4, which had an ending cut scene that lasted 2 hours). And Sony has gone all in on the movie game bandwagon, so they've lost me.

Some IPs I loved that Sony abandoned were SOCOM, Resistance, and the Japan Studio works like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. Do I want them to bring those back? Hell no. I don't want modern Sony touching those classics with a 10-foot pole. We need to let old franchises die for their own good. The modern games industry is Pet Sematary for video games. Yeah, you can bring them back, but they'll be different, they'll be changed. It won't be them anymore, just something dark wearing their skins. Sometimes, dead is better.

[dhaabi]

Yet, Stellar Blade is another third-person action-adventure game albeit one that panders to the male gaze with one-dimensional, overt objectification for no purpose other than that sex sells.

Nevertheless, what kinds of games published by Sony from earlier generations do you like that you think has been abandoned in more recent years? It's not an uncommon opinion you're presenting, but I'm curious since I don't often see people actually elaborate on their view.

And that's a good thing. Overtly sexy women are a welcome change after 10+ years of deliberately ugly designs being pumped out by the western games industry to avoid offending psychologically fragile women. [...] Yet the female gaze is fine, according to the industry. I'm really sick of being told that women can have attractive one-dimensional male characters, but men are evil for wanting attractive one-dimensional female characters.

It seems that you have a misunderstanding of what the male gaze is based on your thoughts regarding what you believe the female gaze is. Neither of the two are defined by the characteristics of what's being viewed but instead by the act of viewing itself. Whereas the male gaze perpetuates the notion that women exist to be seen by, enjoyed by, and to please men, these are not qualities evident of the female gaze. In fact, the female gaze has nothing to do with men at all but is centered around women reclaiming lost personhood and empowering themselves from the default counterpart.

With that said, I think that there are an insignificant number of people who take issue that attractive characters of any gender exist in games; instead, what is bothering is when a character's physical appearance is designed to be engaged with disparagingly in the aforementioned ways while that same character is simultaneously robbed of any agency over it. Conveniently, sworddude has mentioned the character 2B from Nier: Automata who can be an example of a woman character who not only safeguards her agency but actively rejects the male gaze. This is evident when the player attempts to look up her skirt and she forcibly redirects the camera's positioning.

Of course, the condition of women characters being gazed upon by the player audience of video games is but an extension to the real world experiences by real women but, for the sake of this conversation, is being emphasized in the context of games considering the nature of the forum and discussion.

Some IPs I loved that Sony abandoned were SOCOM, Resistance, and the Japan Studio works like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. Do I want them to bring those back? Hell no. I don't want modern Sony touching those classics with a 10-foot pole. We need to let old franchises die for their own good.

I agree, albeit my stance is more grounded from the perspective that new creativity should be fostered instead of indefinitely relying upon previous successes. And if you weren't aware, director of the three games you've mentioned Ueda is working on their own project after having left Sony. I suppose the game could still be published by Sony, though.

[dhaabi]

While we may never know just how successful or not Sony's PC ports may actually be in the context of internal financial expectations, I imagine that Sony's decision to abandon the PC market will, for the time being at least, be worthwhile. From my understanding, their PC ports don't release on the same day as the console counterparts, and it can be many years until they enter a this market space. But this decision to revert business plans shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, really, as Sony's priority is to their own hardware market. Were it otherwise, there would be no need for consumers to buy PlayStation hardware.

[weirdfeline]

And if you weren't aware, director of the three games you've mentioned Ueda is working on their own project after having left Sony. I suppose the game could still be published by Sony, though.

His next game is funded and published by Epic Games like Alan Wake II was and Playdead's next game.

[2ko]

I lost interest in Horizon after they made Aloy canonically lesbian in the Burning Shores DLC for Forbidden West, a baffling move that had no relevance to the plot and served no purpose other than to push an agenda.

Why does being a lesbian need to be plot relevant? Why can't she just be a lesbian.... cause she's a lesbian? There are tons of characters who we know are straight that serve no purpose to the plot. In the first Uncharted we know that Drake is straight, but it doesn't matter to the story at all. It does help develop his character though, as we get to see him develop a crush on Elena Fisher by the end of the game. Likewise, seeing Alloy become closer to Seyka doesn't really matter to the overall plot (yet, more developments could happen in Horizon 3 that make the relationship relevant), but it matters for her character development as we see them getting close.

Anyways, back on topic, it really doesn't matter to me because of the way I collect. I buy Sony published games on PlayStation and Microsoft Studios published games on Xbox. So no change in how I was playing their games. But for people who just play on Xbox or PC yeah it stinks. Sony might not be what they once were, but they do still release solid games overall, and every now and then a real gem comes out. Astro Bot comes to mind for example. When I think about their output recently though they don't really release that many games, so overall its a small loss (a loss all the same though, and I much prefer more consumer friendly practices than less).

I think a big reason for them though is the fact that Xbox is moving towards a more "PC" like architecture, as well as the new Steam console. If I was looking for a new console, and saw that all of PlayStations games were on these other consoles plus games that only release "on PC", I wouldn't be buying a PlayStation (assuming I could get 1 console). Steam takes 30% of game sales, so even though they might be selling the same or more games in such a situation, they might end up making less money because people are not buying them from Sony.

[ssj4yamgeta]

Why does being a lesbian need to be plot relevant? Why can't she just be a lesbian.... cause she's a lesbian? There are tons of characters who we know are straight that serve no purpose to the plot. In the first Uncharted we know that Drake is straight, but it doesn't matter to the story at all. It does help develop his character though, as we get to see him develop a crush on Elena Fisher by the end of the game. Likewise, seeing Alloy become closer to Seyka doesn't really matter to the overall plot (yet, more developments could happen in Horizon 3 that make the relationship relevant), but it matters for her character development as we see them getting close.

If a character in a game doesn't have sex on-screen, I don't want to know what their sexual orientation is because it has no relevance to the story or gameplay. Horizon was never about whether Aloy liked men or women, it was about fighting robot dinosaurs and saving the earth from killer AI. Suddenly declaring a character's sexual orientation over two games into the series is like walking into a living room and blasting a foghorn while everyone else is trying to watch TV. It adds nothing to the experience and only serves to either get attention or piss people off. What's even worse is how it was handled, because the player makes dialogue choices for Aloy throughout the series, but here there wasn't even an option for a hard no. The strongest negative you could choose was, "I'm not ready for this right now/don't need this right now." That's not a refusal, it's a "maybe later."

Romance subplots in general are usually poorly done and used as a cheap way to "add depth" to characters without adding any real substance to them. I really despise shipper culture and how it's created a trend of "Oh, there's two characters! We need to make them shack up!" in modern media. The only stories that benefit from romance are the ones designed around it in the first place. I'd still have been disappointed if they paired Aloy up with a man, though not as much because a heterosexual relationship would have been less aberrant. Yeah, homosexuality exists in nature. So do ebola, rabies, and scat-eating, but very few people want to see those either. Bottom line: if you want to make a game with gay characters, just create your own IP (like the people who made 1348 Ex Voto) and deal with the lower sales numbers. Don't shoehorn your agenda into an existing IP with its own established fanbase so you can piggyback off brand recognition, you'll just piss people off.

[telekill]

Seems this conversation went a couple oddball directions. Let me start with the topic at hand first.

No exclusives mean there's little reason to buy the console. It's one of the many reasons Xbox has been floundering the last couple generations. Since last gen, Xbox has been porting its games to PC and giving us the proof that ports equate less console sales. On the flip side of that coin, as bikingjahuty stated, the developement costs for AAA games have ballooned to the point that most aren't financially viable to remain in one ecosystem. Playstation and Nintendo remain viable due to their larger userbase but for Xbox, that ship sailed a long time ago. It really all depends on how popular the game is and the sales on said platform.

I've been saying since the start of Microsoft's PC porting that they're on a slippery slope and soon enough, Xbox will become irrelevent. We're now at that time, especially with Microsoft now porting their "exclusvies" to Playstation and even Switch 2. There is no reason to buy Xbox hardware.

Now... onto the other topics.

Not all game characters are required to be "attractive". That's the thought when the PS4 gen really began switching from mostly attractive to mostly "realistic". There's two versions of realistic in this sense. There's the Lara Croft realistic where they turned her from sexy bombshell into a more down to earth, girl nextdoor, with regular sized breasts... not the oversized balloons from the PS1 days guaranteed to give any woman back problems by her 40's. Then there's the realistic in that the faces of said characters are just... well...  unappealing. I personally rate attractiveness based on the face first. Then I move down to the body type and decide if she looks healthy. Not body positivity healthy... but the healthy any Millennial and older would recall from their childhood and early adulthood.

The male gaze as in, sex sells (yes, that's what I'm going with), meaning main female characters are required to be scantily clad like in Stellar Blade, MGS 5, Dead or Alive, etc. etc.... Those games aren't going for realistic. Going back to Tomb Raider, even when I was playing the first couple games on PS1 as a teenager, I thought to myself that wearing shorts while running around in the snow was dumb for anyone to do. Then I quickly remembered it's a videogame and ignored the reality of it.

Now let's pivot into the other topic, the modern industry, as the above ties into it quite nicely. One of the reasons so many female characters are unattractive, or part of the LGBTQ community, or take the fun of war (in various forms), giving it an Animal Crossing skin (looking at Warcraft), is because Feminism took over this and most other western entertainment industries. Within the big western developers, are mostly female devs (look at recent developer team photographs) with a very specific lens they view the world through and they can't capture what made games great for men. Modern devs don't understand men because they employ so few and probably don't have any willing to stand for any masculine principals for fear of being shunned and/or fired like those that came before. And yeah, I'm being nice in this paragraph.

We don't see many strong male leads or attractive women in western games anymore because of that worldview. It's how we get abomiations like Horizon: Hunters Gathering. Honestly, when they revealed the upcoming Tomb Raider games, I was pleasently surprised they made young Lara attractive. Even her older self in the upcoming Catalyst is attractive given that she's in her 40's at that point.

Here's the thing. It's not that these "realistic" characters don't belong in gaming. It's that they don't belong in EVERY western game as has been the push for more than a decade. You can take this next line and apply it to any part of the modern era. People are sick of being beat over the head by the leftist agenda. And yes, feminism is leftist. Everything ties together and people have had enough. It's why AAA gaming isn't nearly as strong as it once was. It's why Hollywood is failing. It's why modern television is failing. It's even why mainstream book publishing is failing. Thank God for the independent developers and creatores because they are saving the entertainment industry.

As much as I would love to see Uncharted continue, there's no way in hell I would want modern Naughty Dog, or any mainstream developer touching the series. Modern corporate creators DO NOT care about the fans. They DO NOT care about the stories. They ONLY care about pushing an agenda over EVERYTHING else.

The modern games industry is Pet Sematary for video games. Yeah, you can bring them back, but they'll be different, they'll be changed. It won't be them anymore, just something dark wearing their skins. Sometimes, dead is better.