I sometimes wonder if people factor in cost or if the most diehard PC exponents simply justify the extreme price difference.
I've been looking around for a new desktop PC for office, media and (hopefully) a little gaming. The cost of PC gaming these days is nothing short of extortionate. The best you can do under £1000 is a 4060 with severe compromises elsewhere in the spec. Once you look at 4070 and above costs start around £1600 and to find anything that can compete with expected (real world) PS5 Pro performance I expect you'd need to look at £2,000+ machines.
Back in the day PC was a viable alternative to consoles but I think we have long since passed that point. If more people are given the option to play PS5 ports with settings turned down on a modest PC good for them.
But that's who most of the PC gamers out there are going to be! Look at those Steam GPU usage charts; most people are on GPUs significantly weaker than a 4060. They're fine with that. For them it's probably the convenience of having "good enough" performance combined with ease of access to everything else in one device. A lot of the most popular games on PC, like League or VALORANT, or Counterstrike or World of Warcraft, don't need beefy or even semi-beefy rigs. They scale down well to lower settings.
When I talk about potential PS console owners switching to PC in the event ports become more prominent or even Day 1, I only talk about a subset of hardcore/core enthusiasts. Not even the majority out of that slice, which is much less than general core gamers, casual, or mainstream console owners. However, I think they would be the sort okay with paying a bit more than the cost of a console if it meant getting slightly or much better performance vs. the console, cheaper versions of the games, free online, and the ability to do other things like mods, gaming community (forums, Discord, social media etc.) all through the same one device.
The report I saw stated HFW sales where soft after hitting PS+ - nothing to do with the much later PC port.
Probably why we're seeing fewer 1st party titles hitting PS+, for example GT7, which is also still absent on PC.
We'll see how long that lasts. PSVR2 is getting compatibility improvements for PC, and GT7 was on the Nvidia leak. Maybe plans have changed, but I don't have a lot of confidence in that. Would have to see an official statement to believe such.
I guess Sony considers GT7 a system seller some 2 years after launch - probably a PS5 Pro system seller as well if it gets a major update.
If that's the case, they better not do some BS like utilize GT7 to get quick launch period sales for PS5 Pro only to then announce a PC port a couple months later. Because at that point you know you'd have just been better off waiting for the PC port.
The idea SIE are holding back on 1P reveals to push the Pro already feels sus to me, assuming it's true. Which at first I would've said could never be the case, but now? I'm 50/50.
Of course a capable PC will be better. That will forever be the case.
How does that detract from your enjoyment knowing someone’s playing a game two years after you?
It doesn't...unless I'm misled by the platform holder in buying a product that's less value for my dollar when I could've simply waited a bit later on to get a better version of that product for the same price or less.
At that point, it'd make me feel like my dollar as a customer is being taken for granted. These companies are pretty transparent about roadmaps with shareholders and investors, but would love to keep actual customers in the dark as if to guide them into double or triple-dipping on the same product. At least companies like Take-Two are upfront about their staggered release strategies; they let you know up-front it's coming to console first and you'll get a PC version a year or two later.
With that information, customers can plan how they spend their money more wisely. It's more about that than someone on PC getting to play the game too, for me. Though I do have to say, that PC person is now causing some of these 1P games to slow down in development to accommodate for a PC version earlier in the pipeline, so that means less games over time for the console buyer.
So they aren't blameless in the situation, either.
Exclusives are a thing of the past.
Nintendo and Valve say otherwise. Epic too, for that matter, at least on PC. Stop taking Microsoft's talking points as industry-wide truths; they're only true for
Microsoft (and various 3P devs), no one else.
Everything Sony puts out will be coming to PC.
If SIE want to do that then that's what they'll do. I think it'll ultimately be to the detriment of their console long-term, but it's not my choice to make.
However,
if they're going to do that, they need to be upfront to their console customers (or would-be console customers) and let them know what that porting roadmap is going to be like going forward. None of this "case-by-case" stuff if a person can see a pattern forming, where they're being intentionally vague and obfuscating. Otherwise it's going to look like they want their cake and eat it too, by withholding useful information from customers & preventing them from maximizing their spending dollar.
That's what I would call distasteful, especially considering, again, they don't withhold crucial information from shareholders & investors. And what's really the difference between them and a paying customer, aside of the environment in which the money transaction takes place?