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[Gen.Grievous]

Sony has no idea what gamers really want.

Do gamers even know what they want?

 

[Shaki12345]

Do gamers even know what they want?

I guess the industry needs to collapse in a certain way to then reinvent itself.

Gaming now is totally different than what it was 20 years ago.

The top 10 charts consists mostly of old games. People are less interested in high end graphics, that's for sure.

 

[evanft]

This is irrelevant because they're still not selling the games in 170 countries looking at Spiderman 2 page on steam. They're leaving about 50 percent of sales on the table.

And given the TLOU show, the 2nd game might have become their top singleplayer ccu if it wasn't for the 170 country ban. It still might but not to the same extent.

I looked up the list of countries on the PSN list. It may not be exact, but they represent about 2.5 billion people, which is obviously a lot, but they have a total GDP of about $6.5 trillion, which collectively would make them the world's third largest economy behind China and the USA. The GDP per capita, though, is only around $2,500, so you've got a lot of really poor countries in there. I doubt they're buying a lot of high-end PC games on Steam.

 

[DAHGAMING]

IMHO, it's a matter of years to have a Sony PC Store to rival Steam.

I think we will hear of it over the next 18months and they will want to release and perfect it so its up and running before the PS6. At that point I expect Sony 1st party games to launch day 1 on there PS store with a Steam release down the line. Extras like crossplay/save , trophies, friends list if you have the game on there PS app.

 

[rm082e]

Let's be real Sony first party has never been on the cultural level of Zelda or Pokémon.

No, but they don't need to be to sell PlayStation consoles. Nintendo has to have those huge exclusive IPs that can sell tens of millions of units because the Nintendo console is not the place for the big third party multi-platform games. If Nintendo didn't have huge exclusive IPs, their console wouldn't justify its self.

PlayStation has the big third party multi-platform games, so while their exclusives are an important differentiator against Xbox, they're not as critical to their strategy as Nintendo's big exclusive IPs. Even in years where Sony's first party output is weak, people are still buying and playing COD, Madden, GTA, etc.

 

[HogIsland]

there will be no playstation pc app

 

[Clear]

Do gamers even know what they want?

"Gamers" don't exist. At least not in the monolithic way its typically meant by internet half-wits.

 

[Zacfoldor]

"Gamers" don't exist. At least not in the monolithic way its typically meant by internet half-wits.

Leigh Alexander, is that you?

 

[Clear]

Leigh Alexander, is that you?

No, its the perspective of a "Gamer". Or are you pulling my "Gamer" card for not following your tribe's view?

 

[Pejo]

I assume this will get around Valve's rule of not being able to sell games in countries that don't have PSN support, so it could be seen as a monetary decision. Though, I'm not sure how many big markets don't have PSN support, so who knows.

To me this was a surprisingly consumer-friendly move by Sony. I think they went about the PSN login thing completely the wrong way from the beginning. It should have been an (optional from the start) toe-dip for the Playstation ecosystem. Offer Trophy support alongside the Steam achievements. Offer cross-game save compatibility (even if it's only Playstation -> PC to prevent savegame editing). Offer digital discounts on double dipping, both ways, etc. At least on Steam, they create and control their own game keys, so I would assume they could just sell discounted versions of Steam keys on PSN, similar to how devs sell keys from other stores.

I don't personally see the value in Playstation and PS+ or whatever they're calling it anymore, but there was a lot of room for cross promotion and extending the Playstation platform. Instead, they just made it a mandatory login to help them control banning of players and inflate MAU numbers, which they could already do by adding in the Steam numbers at least. Probably EGS too, I'm sure they have a back end tool to track users.

Anyways, credit where it's due, I'm glad they removed the requirement on a game-by-game basis. I don't personally mind logging in to my PSN account on Steam, but it should not be mandatory, especially for single-player games. There also should be some benefit of logging in, to the players at all levels. That's something they still need to work on, IMO.