Will Sony continue to sell PS5 games on PC? Here’s what insiders say

The word is that Sony is rolling back its strategy of releasing big, exclusive, single-player PlayStation games — the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man, The Last of Us, and God of War — on Windows PC. Without putting formal reporting out there, several well-connected journalists have suggested that the strategy’s days are numbered.

On the Triple Click podcast, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier said, “The sense I’m getting is that they’re backing away from putting their exclusive console stuff, like traditional single-player stuff, on PC. […] I think that’s going to stop.” Schreier cited this year’s Marvel’s Wolverine as one example of an in-house Sony game that may never get a PC version. Schreier confirmed on the ResetEra forum that his comments were “not speculation.”

John Linneman, of the respected gaming tech channel Digital Foundry, concurs. “I have an inkling that they’re pulling away from PC. Watch this space,” Linneman said recently. “I get the feeling that under the current leadership PC has become less important. […] I think console is where they want to be.”

No smoke without fire? Well, there’s certainly plenty of smoke. Enough to reach Jez Corden of Windows Central, who normally focuses on Microsoft and Xbox in his reporting. Months ago, Corden said he’d heard “from a very good source that PlayStation probably is pulling back from PC.”

Meanwhile, noted leaker Nate the Hate posted on X that Sony was “shifting” its PC release strategy away from single-player game releases. “The decision to shift away from supporting PC was made last year,” Nate said.

All were at pains to point out that this strategic shift doesn’t apply to Sony’s live service games, which will continue to pursue multiplatform releases. Helldivers 2 has been an enormous hit on Steam, and eventually even reached Xbox consoles, while Bungie’s Marathon arrives on PC and Xbox as well as PS5 this week.

All the same, if Sony is moving away from releasing its marquee console exclusives on PC, it represents a surprising turn away from the gravitational pull of Steam, which almost the entire gaming industry seems to find irresistible. Microsoft was publishing Xbox games on PC (including Steam) long before its recent transformation into a full-scale multiplatform publisher. Is Sony swimming against the tide? And if so, why?

It turns out that there’s a simple reason for Sony to change its mind: After a strong start, its PC games aren’t really selling.

This was alluded to by Schreier, who said “I’m not sure how super successful those PC releases were,” and Corden, who said PlayStation’s PC releases “didn’t move the needle for them at all.” And it’s backed up by the numbers. A report by industry analysts Alinea Analytics from November 2025 begins by estimating that Sony’s Steam releases have generated no less than $1.5 billion in revenue. But it’s clear that Helldivers 2 is the outlier, with its 12.7 million sales dwarfing the rest of the Sony catalog.

More pertinently, after a strong start, sales of Sony’s core console franchises on Steam are declining. Alinea shows that Steam sales of sequels Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarök, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 all lag far behind those of their predecessors, something the analytics firm attributes to the novelty value of PlayStation games on PC wearing off.

Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

The same trend can be seen in peak concurrent player counts on Steam. Spider-Man hit a peak of 66,436 players in August 2022; Spider-Man 2 managed just 28,189 two and a half years later. God of War Ragnarök’s peak was less than half of God of War’s 73,529.

Frankly, it’s not like these games were all that popular on Steam to begin with. Compare these peak numbers — or The Last of Us’ 36,496, or Ghost of Tsushima’s 77,154 — with a similar, AAA, single-player action-adventure from a third-party publisher but with strong links to the PlayStation brand. Resident Evil Requiem peaked at 344,214 players on Steam this past weekend. By comparison, Sony’s Steam releases started as pretty modest hits, and now they’re barely even that.

There’s a simple reason for these underwhelming numbers. Sony waits at least a year before releasing PC ports of its PS5 exclusives. Once the novelty value of being Nathan Drake on a PC wears off, there’s no way this strategy can compete with the hype of a major day-and-date release like Requiem’s. The low Steam sales indicate players who want to play these games are finding them on PlayStation first — which is, of course, exactly what Sony wants them to do.

Image: Shift Up/Sony Interactive Entertainment

There is one interesting exception. Stellar Blade, the Sony-published action game from Korean developer Shift Up, peaked at an impressive 192,078 players on its Steam release last year. Stellar Blade, which features controversially revealing costumes for its hero character Eve, doesn’t really follow the traditional in-house Sony aesthetic. For all the monolithic size of the Steam audience, maybe players there do have a taste of their own that’s quite distinct from that of the PlayStation mainstream.

Sony could probably improve its PC gaming sales by moving to a day-and-date release model like Xbox’s, but PlayStation executives have repeatedly said they’re unwilling to do this. This is a line in the sand for the company; it will do anything to avoid devaluing its hardware as Microsoft has done.

That being the case, if Sony’s current strategy of delayed PC ports isn’t that effective, it’s logical for the company to choose to bolster PlayStation’s value further by withdrawing from putting its single-player games on PC altogether. It makes sense — even if it’s disappointing for PC gamers.