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When Sony announced that Horizon Zero Dawn was coming to PC in March 2020, it buried the news in the second paragraph of an interview with PlayStation Head of Global Studies Hermen Hulst. Sony was not yelling about its new PC mount; in fact, he seemed so sensitive to potentially strong reactions from his user base that people had to go look for the ad.
“And to calm us down a bit, releasing a first-party AAA title on PC doesn’t necessarily mean that all games will now come to PC,” said Hulst. “In my opinion, Horizon Zero Dawn fits perfectly in this particular case.”
Unlike Microsoft, which has brought all of its exclusive Xbox One games to PC since 2016, Hulst confirmed that there are no plans for day and date releases on PC.
This makes sense. Microsoft has clear incentives to simultaneously launch its games on Windows 10 and console. Among them is Xbox Game Pass for PC, a personalized service for PC gamers that offers many PC-only games. Getting people into that ecosystem, from spending a monthly fee to access a variety of games, is an important part of Xbox’s strategy.
Sony make You have PlayStation Now on PC, but that’s a streaming-based service. Horizon will be a full PC port. Sony doesn’t have the same incentive to launch their games simultaneously as Microsoft, so it’s likely that it will never happen. He mainly makes games to sell PlayStation hardware.
Instead, the experiment is likely to be about sales and player reaction. As the Hulst says, Horizon, with a combat system that relies on the precise use of a bow and arrow, seems like a good fit for the PC, especially when you think about the potential of mouse and keyboard control and how amazing it is. the game will be seen More than 30 fps.
“[Releasing] PlayStation games for PC are a betrayal of people who support PlayStation from PS1. There is no reason to buy a console anymore, “said a Twitter user in response to the news. However, honestly, the reaction was not really that exaggerated unless you went looking for bad shots in the usual irrational corners of the Internet.
That’s because it’s hard to see a downside to this popular PS4 exclusive that makes the leap to the PC, three years after the fact. It actually seems like a pretty good compromise. Horizon Zero Dawn has been discounted so frequently on the PlayStation Store since its launch that anyone who wanted to play on PS4 has had a chance. The value of being exclusive has been preserved, and the game has probably done its job helping to sell consoles, given that 10 million copies of Horizon have been traded.
It is not the only PlayStation game that tries this either. Death Stranding, a PS4 game published by Sony but developed independently, arrives on PC on July 14. The Quantic Dream Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain, and Beyond: Two Souls games were also released on PC, after being exclusive to PlayStation before that.
Sony doesn’t have much to lose by bringing its PS4 games to the PC. You should also do the same with your exclusive PS5 games. That process does not need to be rushed; if it takes a multi-year wait for this to happen, due to the sensitivity of the audience, then so be it. If the end result is a great PC port with detailed graphics settings, and the game has already sold a ton of consoles, why not? For Sony, it’s another way to monetize big-budget games designed to sell dedicated hardware.
Horizon Zero Dawn on PC feels like an experiment, but hopefully it’s the start of something. For PC gamers too, this feels like a continuation of a trend that has been going on for a long time.
When the console classics hit the PC
For the past decade or so, PC gamers have been fortunate enough to see many console classics come to Steam and other services. In many cases, too, a long wait for those games to arrive.
The Yakuza series, for example, started on PS2 in 2005, and finally came to PC in August 2018, starting with Yakuza 0. We’ve seen many late PC console ports, from Final Fantasy 15 to Vanquish or Metal Gear. revenge. More recently, of course, we’ve seen Halo: Master Chief Collection bring a payload of classic FPS titles to the PC.
Most external publishers now launch games on PC and consoles simultaneously, when that has not always been the case.
For PC gamers, it has been exciting to see this trend emerge. At the start of the latest generation of consoles, before Microsoft committed to providing broad compatibility with previous Xbox One versions, it seemed that both manufacturers had lost interest in allowing gamers to bring their old games to new hardware. That meant PC gaming was the way to go if you wanted to buy a game and be more or less sure you could still play it in 10 years.
Backward compatibility seems more important at the beginning of the PS5 and Xbox Series X generation, and both consoles support it to different degrees. But the value of adding classic first-console games to your Steam library has not diminished.
That is why it is so novel to see a PlayStation exclusive game hit the PC, even if it is years old. And that’s why Sony should incorporate PC releases into its future plans for PS4 and PS5 titles, even if they don’t launch simultaneously – the excitement about watching the console classics on PC will never go away.
