Why do you think they are investigating in PC porting companies? Soon all Sony 1st party games will be released within a year of release, then 6 months, then day and date. It's inevitable.
Jim Ryan did say he wanted a bigger audience
Which "gaffer" told you that?
Jimbo got the flavor for PC gamers. Nothing can stop the hunger!
Jimbo and Hermen also said multiple times -basically in almost all interviews where they did talk about PC ports- that they will continue focusing on releasing their games only on PS5 only launch, that releasing some PC ports doesn't mean they will release all their games on PC and that they don't plan to release them day one on PC (that would negatively affect PS5 sales/PSN revenue, which is Sony's biggest revenue and profit source).
If they release some game day one on PC will be MLB due to contractual obligations and a few GaaS title, which will represent a tiny portion of their exclusives catalog.
They bought a PC porting studio because they don't want to wast resources of their main gamedev teams with PC ports or multiplatform development: they want to have them focused on making games for PS. And then some other, separate team(s) will adapt/port them to PC. That Ragnarok LinkIn profile very likely only means that they added the extra stuff for PC of the first GoW to its engine so its sequel could use it in the future when or if they release it on PC somewhere in the future, doesn't mean they plan to release it soon.
With wanting a bigger audience he meant to sell more PS5s, to release ports of old games to PC, to use their PS IPs on mobile games, movies and tv shows and to stream PS games to PC, mobile or smartvs via PS Now.
People still act surprised and make threads about every first party title headed towards PC. They all will at some point. Source: Sony.
Not true. What Sony said publicly said multiple times is that will port some of their games to PC, not all. They also said to don't expect them to release them day one or close to the original launch on PC outside MLB and maybe a handful of specific GaaS cases.
Ragnarok will release on PC even faster than the first. Once they get a taste of that money its over. The longer they stagger the release, they know PC users won't pay full price for it. The reason GOW is only $50. They want full price.
I think that faster yes, but still far from the original PS release.
Maybe 2-3 years instead of almost 4 years. They saw that with preorders alone they did hit Steam's top 1 and will be an almost 4 years old game. And very likely will sell more than Days Gone, Death Stranding and Horizon, which until now (will continue selling more) sold around 2M copies on PC.
But their main revenue and profit source is PSN 3rd party content, which makes way more money than 1st party games. They won't risk selling PlayStations/making money with PSN just to sell a few millions copies more of their games on PC, specially considering they have to give 30% of their revenue there to Steam. They will continue having a safe distance between original PS4/PS5 release and PC port release.