PlayStation Classic: Strong reviews, weak steam sales
Despite competition from Xbox, Sony maintains console dominance. Activision Blizzard's acquisition by Microsoft adds pressure on Sony's PC games. Low sales raise questions on Sony's PC launch strategy.
Despite direct competition from Microsoft's Xbox, which shared similar hardware, games, and customers, Sony has maintained its dominance in the console wars.
Activision Blizzard's recent acquisition by Microsoft has strengthened its overall gaming lineup, including Call of Duty, the market leader among console games. Since Microsoft has historically always been more dominant in the PC industry, this has ultimately increased pressure on Sony.
The company has generally had difficulty finding any significant success with PC games, such as when Rift Apart was made available for this platform. For many years, Sony has relied on the critically acclaimed Rachet & Clank brand, and the most recent PlayStation 5 release has been a huge commercial and critical success.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, which according to SteamDB has an 84% ‘Very Positive’ rating based on 670 user reviews, only reached its peak of 8757 active users on July 26, the day it was released. The game is the third-worst PC launch for PlayStation, with sales falling even more in the days that followed and showing no signs of recovering.
Check out the top games on Steam with the most concurrent players below from PlayStation Studios:
- God of War – 73,529K
- Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered – 66,436K
- Horizon Zero Dawn – 56,557K
- The Last of Us Part I – 36,496K
- Days Gone – 27,450K
Why do Sony's games perform poorly on PC?
The top-ranked game on Steam, “Tom Clany's The Division” has an all-time high of 114,228 (via SteamDB), while Sony's most active players do not even crack the top 100.
The disastrous porting of console games to the PC has been the main topic of speculation regarding PlayStation's shortcomings. Early praise for the gameplay in Ratchet and Clank's reviews, however, suggested that this was not the case.
The low sales figures instead seem to point more towards Sony's efforts to attract new customers who aren't familiar with the system's massive games.
The dominant console and game developer may need to reconsider its PC launch strategy going forward if they intend to keep bringing their exclusives to the platform, despite a long history of success.
