It already has been successful for them for many years, starting with horizon zero dawn and god of war many years ago and that brought them console buys before later porting the sequels to pc for the same purpose.
This isn’t some new strategy for them, just a continuation of something that has already been successful.
If we are going with anecdotal evidence of a reddit comment as evidence. Then I'll throw in mine of I went from owning Playstations for exclusives to skipping it this gen, since I don't feel like dropping that much money to play earlier.
In a vacuum, it might work. Unfortunately for them, there are decades of quality games that are completely outside of Sony's grasp. We can wait, lol. I am still waiting for last of us to go on a steep sale. I can wait :)
What it actually does in my case is make me forget about the game before it comes to PC, and just not buy or play it. I might be excited about a game now while the hype is fresh but in 6 months, I'll be excited about other stuff. If anything, I'll buy it when it's 75% off on some Steam sale.
I was saving up to buy PS5 for a long time too. But, when I couldn’t buy one, I just bought PS4 for half price and then, since Sony releases it’s games on PC anyway, I am not going to buy PS5. I have no need for that.
I thought way evga used to handle sales of GPU with people being sent a message when they were next on queue was a great way of handling shortages so people didn't have to try and go stand in line for hours or try to check out before bots online. Same with how steam handled the sale of their steam deck letting people know when they were next in line.
Either that or, I might get a used PS4 together with used physical copies of the games in a few years, when it’s much cheaper, play them and then sell it all again or give it to my brother or something.
The Steam Deck did that, and I would happily buy a Sony handheld or something if it offered value.
But no, they instead want me to buy a locked down system that competes with my existing PC, and their sales pitch is, "buy this or you can't play these games." I don't respond well to threats of FOMO, so I'm not going to buy it. I own a Switch and a Steam Deck because they provide value I can't get elsewhere, I don't own a Playstation or an Xbox because they don't.
When so much is multi-player now, the cross platform stuff sucks on console. Average PC players are gods compared to using a regular controller on console.
Opening their platform has become a more major consideration for me sense the Steam Deck, I didn't think it would be possible in a console like form before, but the Deck has caused me to raise my standards
(Not that I was ever the biggest console gamer before either...)
Yeah, I bought it because it was an interesting form factor, not too expensive, and I could repurpose it if I ended up not liking the Steam experience. I honestly play 99% Steam games, so I'm liking it a lot.
I don't buy most consoles (except Switch) because they're not interesting form factors, games are generally a lot more expensive, and it'll just become ewaste.
If Sony made a good, standalone handheld, I might get it. If Microsoft continued the Kinect, I might get an Xbox (I had the 360 for Kinect in the past). But no, neither is compelling, so I don't buy them.
If it helps, I mostly got it so I could play fun couch co-op games w/ my kids. We've taken it camping, on road trips, etc, and it's honestly quite good for that.
I still haven't played Cyberpunk yet, which seems like it's aimed directly at me and I really want to play, just because it hasn't been cheap enough on the Steam sales yet. I think they might be slightly underestimating the patience of PC gamers lol.
Jokes on them, I rarely buy a game at release anyway. An extra year of console players beta-testing the game just means I am more likely to know a game is a dud that much sooner.
They're going to be waiting for a long, long time then.
Get your shit on steam and stop making that stupid PSN network that leaked my information that I'm still dealing with to this day a requirement to play your first party games.
You're probably in the minority. There's 16k subscribers in this community and, currently, about 30 million active users on Steam. Most of them have never heard of Lemmy, and heck a lot of them probably were never on Reddit. The PS5 has sold 50 million units- that's over 3,000 PS5's for every subscribed account here.
A lot of users here have PC's that approach or exceed the PS5's capabilities. You have fancy expensive monitors, a nice desk and chair, a gaming mouse and mechanical keyboard. The people this CEO is talking about don't. They may have an old desktop from the pandemic, or a laptop. They might just use their kitchen table as a desk.
Or, heck, they might not even have a desktop or laptop at all. It's still early, but there have been studies suggesting that Gen Z and Alpha are using PC's less and doing more of their computing on phones and tablets.
Overall I thought it was great that Sony started releasing their games on PC (and especially through Steam, usually with pretty decent PC ports). It's great to give consumers more options. Delaying the PC release probably means more time for the devs to work on the port (Sony's PC ports have been mixed on launch, but even the bad ones have gotten fixed pretty quickly afterwards, and it's been a while since the last one). Delaying PC versions seems like a pretty reasonable compromise.
They've been doing this strategy for a few years now, and Sony isn't seeing PS5 grow the way they need it to, and that's in an environment where they're so dominant that their competition has thrown in the towel. PC overtook any one console some years ago, and due to how long it takes Sony to make them now, they don't have the volume of unique exclusives to entice people to buy the console like they used to. This strategy isn't working, and they will pivot. They just need to say, for now, that they're not going to.
What makes you think the PS5 isn't growing how they need it to? It's outselling the Xbox and it isn't close. In a less direct comparison, it's outselling the Switch. It's outselling what the PS4 did, and that was successful. I don't understand where this sentiment that the PS5 is struggling is coming from. The second half of your first sentence even mentions that they're really dominant right now.
I also don't understand "PC overtaking any one console"... Like, how is that even a comparison? When was the last time there were more consoles than consumer PC's.... The SNES era? I'm not even sure about that, you might need to go further back.
Even if you want to talk about just gaming, that's tricky to even start to compare. The closest I can think of is that according to this Steam averaged 120 million monthly users last year. According to this, PSN averaged 118 million monthly users in Q4 2023. That's pretty much dead even. I don't think it makes sense to add other platforms to the PC side without adding in Nintendo and Xbox to the console side, in which case... Consoles have more users and it's not close. And they both are just a fraction of the mobile gaming market anyways.
Sony has absolutely proven that they can generate the unique exclusives that sell consoles. That's.... Why they have the best-selling console right now. Their strategy is working. You could say this about plenty of other consoles at points in the past (PS3, WiiU, 3DS, GameCube, N64, Xbox One). If you even said this a couple years ago about Sony struggling to manufacture PS5's fast enough that might make sense. But they're currently dominating the home console market. So I don't understand why you think they're struggling or need to drastically change the way they do things?
Just to clarify- what strategy are you predicting that they will change?
There are at least tens of thousands of games to play on the PC. They must expect FOMO to be a huge motivator but I don't think it's going to have much of an effect.
I feel like the better thing to compete on is "plug it in and it works", "easier to play on your couch and TV with a controller than a PC" and various comparisons to the other consoles.
Other than setup and ease of couch gaming, PC has them beat hands down. And it's only very slightly easier in those dimensions too.
Which on the other hand is something many PC gamers and content with. Steam consoles didn't sell well because the market for PC fixed consoles wasn't there.
Yup. It's why they're unlikely to get conversions, but they might get people to do both.
Consoles compete with PC gaming, but they're not substitutes. The best they can hope for is people who are relatively indifferent to the advantages a PC has being persuaded by the console advantages, or people who are okay with just having both picking a PS5 over an Xbox or Nintendo.
For the latter, I think they'd be better served looking for a way to do "but it in one, play it in both" type deals, since that makes the ambivalent people more likely to default to PlayStation, since they still get PC, and the "both" people are more likely to buy sooner, since waiting doesn't get them anything.
I'm not pissed at this strategy like typical ones, however I absolutely hate having my collection of a series split across platforms and feel like this isn't the least common idea. Now, if they were to include the older game in with the new one in this strategy or have some sort of cross buy feature for older titles, but this will never happen.