Sony will stop selling PS5 games on PC because they're not selling

PlayStation hits like God of War and Marvel's Spider-Man don't replicate that success on Steam

According to a new report, 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. Bloomberg reports that plans for PC versions of last year's Ghost of Yōtei and the forthcoming Saros, along with other internally developed games, have been scrapped as part of a strategic shift.

Live-service games from Sony, like Bungie's Marathon, will still see multiplatform releases — unsurprisingly, given the huge success of Helldivers 2 on Steam in 2024. But the single-player action-adventures that are PlayStation's stock-in-trade will go back to console exclusivity.

The report follows on the heels of several well-connected journalists, including Bloomberg's own Jason Schreier, suggesting that the strategy’s days are numbered. Schreier first mentioned his sense that Sony's PC releases were “going to stop” on the Triple Click podcast, citing this year’s Marvel’s Wolverine as one example of an in-house Sony game that may never get a PC version.

John Linneman, of the respected gaming tech channel Digital Foundry, concurred. “I have an inkling that they’re pulling away from PC,” Linneman said recently. “I think console is where they want to be.” Windows Central's Jez Corden said months ago that 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 “the decision to shift away from supporting PC was made last year.”

Sony moving away from releasing its marquee console exclusives on PC 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?

Bloomberg's report cites poor sales of several recent PlayStation games on PC as one reason for the change, along with a sense that the PC initiative risked damaging the console's brand, the inconsistent execution of the strategy, and the risk of PlayStation games being playable on the next Xbox console, which is reportedly compatible with Windows PC games.

Sales are certainly a concern for Sony; after a strong start, its PC games aren’t really selling. 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, 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.

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.

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.

Update (March 4): The article has been updated to reflect new, more substantive reporting from Bloomberg that Sony is changing its PC game release strategy.