Few PC owners will argue against the notion that Sony’s project to bring its first-party games to PC is one of the best things to have happened to the platform in recent years. Something that we once would have thought impossible at the height of the console wars is slowly becoming standard practice, and both gamers and Sony have been reaping the rewards of blockbuster games likeGod of War, Marvel’sSpiderman, andHorizon: Zero Dawn coming to PC.
But after the unanimous success of those games, as well as the likes ofDays GoneandDeath Stranding, coming to PC, it looks like Sony’s momentum has started to slow. In recent weeks,Sackboy: A Big Adventure and, more surprisingly,Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection have failed to land on Steam with the seismic impact of previous Sony outings. In fact, they’ve both been waaaay off the pace.Steamcharts showsthat Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection clocked less than half the Steam player count thatDays Gone, ranked just above it in player counts, had at the same time after its release, while Sackboy has been seeing average player counts in the lowly mid-100s.
So why has everyone suddenly gone cold on Sony?
With Sackboy at least, the reasons are fairly apparent, and that’s that, well,no one gives a shit about Sackboy. Sorry toSackboy fan Ariana Grandeand all the people angrily waving their bristly Sackboy plushies in the air while insisting that Sackboy could be Sony’s answer to Mario if only he got the chance, but it’s true. I said myself a few weeks ago that within the Sackboy IP, it’s the lovely creation engine that isLittleBigPlanet that would have the best chance of flourishingon PC, rather than the anodyne platformer. Five, six years ago it could’ve been a different story, but these days the PC is very well accounted for when it comes to platform games. With so manygreat 2D platformerson the indie scene at sensible prices, the thought of forking out $60/£50 for the two-year-old Sackboy is kind of unfathomable.
Uncharted has, inevitably, done much better than Sackboy, but still far off the less established Days Gone, let alone God of War, Spidey, or Horizon. That’s a little more surprising, given the series' brand recognition and the fact that Uncharted 4 was the second best-selling game on PS4, sandwiched right between God of War and Marvel’s Spider-Man. But there are a few things that differentiate Uncharted from its PC-ported peers that could have worked against it.
First, there’s the self-evident point that Uncharted 4 is the fourth game in a strongly story-driven series, whereas all the other PS-to-PC games are the first in their respective series, and therefore a more welcoming entrypoint for new players. Having the Uncharted: Lost Legacy spin-off bundled in is unlikely to help in this regard, because like spin-offs are wont to do, it expects players to be at least somewhat familiar with the series. Both of those Uncharted games are great, make no mistake, but they never seemed to draw as much intrigue and impassioned discussions like thatotherNaughty Dog series, The Last of Us. I’m certain that when The Last of Us Part 1 (and eventually, Part 2) comes to PC, it’ll fare far better than ol' Nathan Drake, because it just holds more cultural capital outside of the Sonysphere.
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Some would also point to the fact that, having come out in 2016, Uncharted 4 is the oldest game yet that Sony is porting over to PC, which makes it something of a distant memory in gaming terms. That may be a factor too, but it wouldn’t be an issue if Uncharted had some kind of foothold on PC. After all, Bloodborne came out in 2014, but it’s hard to see that not being an absolute hit should it ever come to PC - part of the reason being that the Soulsborne series already has a large and longstanding following on the platform.
With Sackboy, the reasons are fairly apparent:no one gives a shit about Sackboy.
To some extent, the wave of Playstation games coming to PC has benefited from a phenomenon that I like to call ‘prospective games-buying.’ It goes like this: when a game that for a long time has been associated with or exclusive to one platform crosses over to another platform, people will buy that game not just because they like the game itself (though of course it helps), but to show their support for the company in the hope that it will incentivise said company to bring better games - the games wereallywant - to that platform.
It’s impossible to gauge just how much of this phenomenon translates into actual sales, but you see it in user reviews for games all the time. When writing aboutthe incredible Project Zero PS2 trilogyrecently, I pointed out the various Steam reviews that are imploring people to buy the ‘eh so-so’ Maiden of Black Water PC port to show Koei Tecmo that we want them to keep porting the series to PC, so that eventually they’ll get round to releasing the beloved original trilogy. It’s pretty bad consumer logic in my opinion but hey, far be it from me to tell people how to spend their money.
To a lesser extent, that’s what’s been happening with Playstation games on PC.Three of the four top-ranked ‘Most Helpful’ (i.e. most ‘Liked’ by other users) reviewsof Days Gone on Steam make requests for other games like Bloodborne, Ghost of Tsushima, and (yep) LittleBigPlanet. It’s a similar story with Horizon: Zero Dawn (see picture below). People may well love these games, but there’s definitely a sense that a large number of reviews double as wishlists, and that players are buying these games partly to propel Sony’s project and for future rewards.
In fairness, most of the games Sony has brought to PC have been excellent - blockbuster classics that are right at home on the platform. Perhaps that early success made Sony a bit too comfortable, leading them to believe that PC players would buy the rather random Sackboy: A Big Adventure, or the fourth game in a story-led series without playing the first three (still great) games. Alternatively, perhaps these ports aren’t too resource-heavy for Sony to knock out, and are more about padding out Sony’s roster so that when they bring some form of Playstation subscription service to PC to rival Game Pass (as I believe they will), they’ll have a substantial amount of first-party games ready to go on it.
Sony’s PC project undoubtedly has many great hits and good times ahead. This isn’t even necessarily a bump in the road, but itisa sign that perhaps the honeymoon period is over. Playstation games have been on PC now for a good few years, and without the novelty factor and prospective buying, the games that they bring over will need to hold up on their own merits.
PC players have shown that they won’t just lap up anything that Sony delivers to them, but that’s not necessarily a problem when Sony has plenty of excellent titles whose success on PC is as good as written in the stars. Now, I just need to wrap this up before I turn this feature into yet-another wishlist for Sony…
… but how about that Bloodborne, eh Sony?
