[STEAM] Ex-PlayStation boss says PC ports weren't losing Sony any hardware sales, questions how it could think otherwise now it's reportedly keeping big single-player games console-exclusive

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Although PC ports have done quite well for the company in recent years,

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's

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decided to

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. To what end is unclear – there weren't all that many to start with – but a former higher-up from the corporation doesn't see the logic here, because the games were finding players they would never have otherwise.

On the

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(via

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), Shawn Layden, former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, explains he can't quite wrap his head around Sony seemingly pushing away the PC audience.

"First of all, the games don't go on PC for like a year or whatever it is," he says. "It's not day and date, and if they think that a game coming out 18 months after its launch on another platform somehow stopped a ***** from happening 18 months ago in the hardware business, I would like to see how they can prove that thesis."

A year and a half is actually on the lower side. Some of the ports we've seen on PC, such as

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,

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, and

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, took years to move away from PS4 and PS5 and onto the likes of

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and the

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.

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As Layden points out, on that timescale, it's probably safe to assume those fans weren't going to be buying the base console. "If someone's waiting 18 months for something to come on PC, we didn't lose a ***** to them," he says, emphatically. "They weren't going to buy the hardware anyway."

He believes the development cost for these versions was likely the largest contributing factor to Sony's reported pivot, and he points out he didn't push the business in this direction to make money. It's about making PlayStation-associated franchises available to greater amounts of people.

"The PC thing, in my mind anyway at the time, was not to make money, frankly, it was how do I get my intellectual property in front of people who wouldn’t normally see it?" he says.

"How do I get the world of Horizon to be seen by people who aren't in the PlayStation world?" he adds. "Not necessarily because they're going to buy a PlayStation, I wasn't that crazy. I didn't think that was going to happen."

It's a fair argument, and now that the

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exists, you have to wonder whether Sony's cutting off its nose to spite its face here. Alas, this is the reality at present, but we'll see what the future holds.

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