A raft of PlayStation exclusives is on the way to PC, including motorcycle adventure-slash-zombie game Days Gone, which is due out on PC this spring. That’s according to Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan, who spoke with GQ about his plans for PlayStation 5.
Days Gone launched for PlayStation 4 in 2019, and it’s an open-world game about riding a motorcycle as the greasy badass Deacon St. John, whose gruff exterior belies a fundamental good nature. Unfortunately, opportunities to put this to use are few and far between in the zombie-infested wilds of post-apocalypse Oregon, where you’ll be running from swarms of ‘freakers’ while searching for parts for your bike and staying alive.
Ryan said that Sony’s plan is to continue porting PlayStation 4 exclusives to PC, for several reasons. First, he said the success of Horizon Zero Dawn on PC showed that there’s an audience for Sony’s IP here. “People liked it and they bought it,” he said simply. “We also looked at it through the lens of what the PlayStation community thought about it. There was no massive adverse reaction to it. So we will continue to take mission steps in this direction.”
So whatever negative comments about it you may have encountered online, they didn’t amount to enough pushback to have an impact on Sony’s plans – or on its bottom line. The economics of game development, Ryan said, are helping drive the new push to launch Sony’s first-party games on PC.
“There’s an opportunity to expose those great games to a wider audience and recognise the economics of game development, which are not always straightforward,” he said. “The cost of making games goes up with each cycle, as the calibre of the IP has improved. Also, our ease of making it available to non-console owners has grown. So it’s a fairly straightforward decision for us to make.”
Put another way, it’s easier than it’s ever been to make Sony’s games available to a wider audience, and that makes it a profitable enterprise – where in the past, that financial benefit wasn’t necessarily quite as clear.
Ryan didn’t reveal any of the other PlayStation games that have PC ports in development – but there will no doubt be much talk of Bloodborne in the weeks to come.