According to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier on May 18, Hermen Hulst, CEO of PlayStation Studios, announced during an internal staff meeting that “the company’s narrative-driven single-player games will become PlayStation exclusives.” This means major titles such as Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Ghost of Yotei, Saros, and Marvel’s Wolverine will no longer receive PC releases; they will be available solely on PlayStation consoles. This decision effectively ends Sony’s six-year cross-platform strategy that began in 2020 with the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn; prior to this, Sony had successively released titles like God of War, Spider-Man, Ghost of Tsushima, and The Last of Us on PC. Online multiplayer and service-based games remain unaffected and will still launch simultaneously on consoles and PC, as Sony believes the success of multiplayer titles such as Helldivers 2 relies on a unified player base across platforms.
The core rationale behind this return to exclusivity is Sony executives’ concern that widespread availability of exclusive games on PC is diminishing the PS5’s appeal as a “must-buy” product and negatively impacting console sales—particularly where it concerns big-budget narrative single-player games. Industry analysts widely interpret this move as a defensive tactic by Sony to strengthen its console ecosystem ahead of the upcoming development of PS6. For PC gamers, the previous practice of waiting a year for PC versions of such games may now come to an end.