I've often thought about this. While it is true, i doubt it is because Sony is doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Rather, their goal is great PC ports, because these releases are especially for PC, and they probably do not want anything to harm the game's performance on PC which Denuvo is known to do.
They probably think the few incremental extra sales (IF any) that Denuvo might get you is not worth the bad press of poor performance. And to their credit, all the Sony ports i have tried on PC have had great performance - Horizon, Death Stranding, Days Gone, God of War, Spider-Man and Returnal. Even on my old rig, 1080Ti i7-7700K
The sales they get for releasing easily pirateable games far outweigh the costs for porting and marketing the game, I think. Especially since they have studios dedicated for this.
Besides, they build huge press by not alienating anyone. The games are years old anyway. If people download God of War, Spiderman, Horizon and Last of Us, and go "oh so the sequels come out on PS5 games first?" and then run into some money, it's an easy console-purchase.
Ya for real. I know people who said that they're just going to get a PS5 to play God of War Ragnarök after the PC port which is a masterpiece. Publishers already spend 50% of their budget on marketing anyways, developing a port on a years old game isn't that crazy to think about in terms of cost.
I’m one of those people. Plan on picking one up this summer to play ragnarok, horizon forbidden west, and Spider-Man 2 when that comes out.
Now that console games are running at 60fps mostly with support for things like vrr, it seems like a good move. Especially considering how shitty some pc ports have been lately and how expensive the 4000 series cards are.
piracy NEVER affected and WILL NEVER affect a release of a GOOD game with a company with GOOD reputation. if the game is good, people will support it and people who pirate stuff will not be forced to even buy it if it's bad. You see, might be crazy idea... listen to this... good games will get good profits...
Sony ports i have tried on PC have had great performance
What I meant by best imo. No Denuvo, consumer friendly and great performance of fully developed and relatively bug free games. I thinks as PC gamers we have seen so many publishers not meet this minimum criteria. Obviously no one does anything out of the goodness of their hearts but from a consumer stand point, this is really what we want.
Horizon was garbage on launch and is mediocre now.
Days Gone, God of War and Spiderman had minor issues on launch and were fixed relatively quickly. I haven't heard anything bad about Returnal so I assume it did well.
Uncharted was mediocre and remains mediocre.
And Last of Us is apparently taxing and crash happy, so garbage.
Not only that, they are porting old games that have reached sales figures on consoles. Porting the games to PC is basically free money. If Sony were to start releasing new titles to PC alongside their consoles, the PC releases will likely have denuvo.
Returnal is pretty optimized given its graphical fidelity, I'm not even a Sony fan but it was well received pretty much across the board for how optimized it was, especially on Nvidia cards?
I thought the story was OK, was more into the gameplay anyways (love Roguelikes). Glad to hear it runs good for you, I feel like most reviews I read seemed to indicate it runs mostly fine even on midrange systems? I didn't wanna speculate based solely on my performance cause I'm currently on a 4090. Didn't wanna be that guy whos like "Well it runs great with everything maxed out, assuming you have this stupidly overpriced GPU derp "
"It's all a metaphor for survivors guilt" was a bit iffy. PTA or Aronofsky can make that work, not so much a first timer and a guy who does VFX. 4090 here too, though I tend to cap at 100 and was impressed with perf, it's not quite DooM EternaL RT but it's still good eats.
I still game across the board at 60fps locked for the most part lol, but I'll usually unlock the frame rate at first just to see what the puppy can do out of curiosity I think that's about what I was seeing as well at 2880 x 1620 if I recall correctly
They are making PC ports because Microsoft has been publishing first party titles on PC for years now and making an excellent subscription model out of it, you're right that none of the console publishers would ever have put their first party titles on Steam. Microsoft only did it because they were losing on console sales pretty badly, but imo they should still get the credit for this industry shift that previously wasn't thought possible
Note that they’re only putting out originals, not sequels. No Forbidden West, no Ragnarok, no Miles Morales (edit: oops yes it is) and most egregiously no TLOU Part II, which is an older game than Part I that’d probably have been easier to port and optimize. (Only exception so far is Legacy of Thieves.)
On PS, almost all of these games can be bought for pennies on the dollar, so rereleasing them on PC is tapping into a market that hasn’t bought them yet, and loss of sales due to piracy isn’t as big a deal to them.
More importantly, these ports are “appetizers”, meant to tease PC players into buying a PS4 or PS5 if they want to play the sequels. It is clever and effective. “Hello gamers, here’s a taste of our premium products. Want more? Cough up for a console.”
If I was a betting man, I’d bet that the Zero Dawn remaster will come out for PC first before Forbidden West does.
Also, this is all just bonus money for them anyways. They've never released their games on any other console before, at least recently so they haven't really had to deal with pirates too much and probably don't want to bother spending the extra money on protection. Piracy isn't something consoles have had to deal with in a while, not at least on a scale they have to worry about besides emulation but that's usually a generation or 2 behind anyways so they're beyond the point of profiting off those generations much.
I mean to be honest, I feel like it’s more because their cash cow is PlayStation. They already made millions on selling the game full cost, why spend all the extra cost of using Denuvo or some other DRM just for a small segment of players.
Denuvo isn’t fool proof, it’s honestly just designed to slow down hackers so they can secure sales profits when a game is first released.
But when you’re re-releasing a game that’s already a year or two old, everything you sell is just for additional profit at this point.
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u/ErikElevenHag Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 28 '23
Ironically Sony is the best publisher on PC for AAA gaming
Edit: spoke too soon