Should Sony Reconsider Killing Future Single-Player PlayStation Ports to PC?

Bloomberg's typically well-informed Jason Schreier has reported that new single-player PlayStation games won't be ported to PC, in a major departure from past Sony strategy. The announcement was reportedly made in a recent Sony town hall meeting by PlayStation studios boss Hermen Hulst, and follows on from reports in March that 2025 PlayStation tentpole Ghost of Yotei wouldn't see a PC release - something that now seems confirmed. But is it the right move?

Before we get into that, it's worth clarifying that while narrative games are reportedly now off the cards, multiplayer offerings from Sony studios will still be released on PC. However, that is cold comfort given the quantity and quality of Sony first-party games that made the transition to PC over the past six years, including multiple titles from series like Horizon, The Last of Us, Marvel's Spider-Man and God of War, not to mention single entries from Uncharted, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet and Clank, Days Gone and Returnal. Just these names account for 14 games in total, and form a distinct part of the PC landscape.

As well as being uniformly well-reviewed and popular games, Sony's single-player ports also typically impressed on a technical level, whether that was in terms of ray-traced open worlds like Marvel's Spider-Man and Horizon Forbidden West, or in terms of rapid loading via DirectStorage like Ratchet and Clank. Sure, there were occasional launch let-downs like Horizon Zero Dawn or The Last of Us Part 1, but games from Dutch porting masters Nixxes in particular set a high technical standard for scalability and polish.

It's impossible to view this as good news for PC gamers, but it's worth bearing in mind the state of play for PlayStation too. Rivals Xbox have publicly committed to a hybrid console that sits halfway within the PC space, so turning off the tap for PC ports also hurts Microsoft's next-generation efforts. Even if those games would have arrived a year (or more) later after first launching on PlayStation 6, it's clear that Sony would rather its own studios work on PlayStation exclusives. This is the same model that Nintendo has operated under for years, of course.

Having a strong library of exclusive games also helps to justify the high console prices that manufacturers like Sony are being forced into by the huge AI-fuelled rise in flash memory components like RAM, VRAM and SSDs. Given the popularity of PC gaming and the rise of gaming handhelds alongside laptops and desktops, it gets a lot harder to justify a PS5 Pro or PS6 upgrade if you already have a decent gaming PC. Move those console exclusives back to being true exclusives though, and the proposition looks a little sweeter.

There's also the ongoing trend for ballooning development costs for PC games. While most PlayStation releases have arrived in good condition, sloppier releases have suffered poor initial reviews as a result, no doubt depressing sales to some extent. Actually producing a great PC port and avoiding the usual pitfalls is not the work of a moment. Eliminating stutter, making a great options menu, properly supporting arbitrary resolutions and frame-rates, building on the console release with new graphical technologies and scalable settings; all of these take a lot of development and QA effort, which doesn't come cheap.

With all of these confluent factors, perhaps it's a surprise that PlayStation ports to PC lasted as long as they did. And yet, Sony's abandonment of its PC fans still feels cold-hearted to me, not to mention the effect that this will have on specialist porting studios like Iron Galaxy and Nixxes, who will have far fewer big titles to work on going forward.

But what do you make of Sony's decision? Let us know in the poll above and the comments below - we're really interested to hear your thoughts.