PlayStation can introduce a launcher on PC if they want but for the love of god keep releasing games on Steam as well.
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That is for Steam keys only. Valve can't control other prices.
No, instead they can decide who they maintain their agreement with. There is a reason why you don't see this on Steam vs other PC platforms.
Generally speaking the only deviations are regional pricing related, and sales tend to have similar pricing on the various PC stores over time (ie GOG, EGS, other publisher services)
God I hope they backdate this to other releases. Heck open it up to other publishers too. I'd play far more on steam deck and PC if I could get trophies.
Sounds like some people out here are advocating for more PS exclusive nonsense. Lol
Because they won't have the same features. They will come up with things to try and draw people to their own launcher, besides cross-platform whatever.
And frankly, Xbox has shown that making a PC platform that's meant to tie into a long-standing console ecosystem is a terrible idea. I don't know if Sony can avoid the same pitfalls, where the PC side of the ecosystem is locked down to accommodate console restrictions, and is consistently the side that gets shafted whenever compromise is needed.
There would be no reason not to be day 1 games if Sony locks the games to their launcher. The PC would essentially be a better performing version of a console. The reason there's not day 1 games on PC games currently is because they want people into their ecosystem by buying a console and avoid the middleman. That's not gonna happen as long as they release on Steam.
I don't want a Playstation launcher arbitrarily existing so Playstation can get a bigger cut. Leaving Steam with no real tangible benefits to the user is an incredibly foolish move. If a Playstation launcher were to ever exist, I would want them to copy Microsoft's strategy, simultaneous releases, crossbuy, the subscription service with an extensive library, including the part where I'm able to ignore it and continue buying their games on Steam because the Xbox app on Windows sucks.
Well then I hope your good with late ports continuing. PC players can't have their cake and eat it too.
Is the haptic feedback stuff on the ps5 controller good? Thinking about getting one for this (and potential other ports if it'll be more widely supported in the future).
Someone can probably bring up that long list of excuses of "Sony are not doing x on PC because y", which has turned into an ever increasing number of wacky excuses.
Basically, Sony are going to do whatever is going to make them the most money without destroying their business, and that has for the longest time meant extending onto platforms with players they can't reach on console alone. Bringing games to PC made sense, doing it via Steam (a thing folks said was impossible) was immediately the way they did it, and now day 1 has started to happen with multiplayer focused titles (something previously proclaimed impossible).
Now your argument is never day 1 because they want people in their ecosystem - yet here is the moment I said would happen years ago, where effectively PSN is extended onto PC, not via a launcher, but directly via the game on Steam, EGS, and soon GOG I'm sure. Why? Because it's the most frictionless way to do it, meeting these players where they already prefer to play, and has the highest chances of retaining them. Eventually I'm sure they'll extend other services for recurring revenue, whether that's via subscriptions or otherwise, whether within PC ecosystems and/or in their own App, but they'll likely just keep doing this on the various established PC ecosystems too.
Chances are they are going to experiment with some day 1 titles and find that it isn't causing any colossal fallout since people are just going to play where they prefer to play. For other titles maybe not. And they'll balance that out.
Hope people can disable or find a way to disable the overlay, I don't care about trophies and it is silly when multiple achievement overlay popups appear at once during gameplay.
Sony better get comfortable with missing out on "the cultural moment" their games have too then because it goes both ways. How many sales are they missing out on because their ports are viewed as leftovers from a couple years ago that no one really talks about anymore? Ghost of Tsushima is a bit of an outlier since it's such a unique setting done incredibly well but a lot of my friends skipped Horizon, TLOU and Spider-Man for various reasons. Spoilers, lack of excitement, already watched lets plays years ago etc.
If I were an executive over there I'd be asking myself to imagine the scenario where Helldivers 2 went with their usual staggered launch practice. It's not good for them and I don't see why Sony needs to maintain their own walled garden environment on PC to do singleplayer-focused day one releases. As mentioned above, this is just the latest on a long list of "Sony isn't doing X because Y and will only do so if they Z".
It's simple. What does Sony get out of having cheap day 1 games on Steam instead of their own platform? Nobody ever looks at both sides at these things on here. It's always "what can they do for me!?". Which is fine as a consumer, but on a board where we discuss why companies make certain moves, it's always one sided.
Having their own launcher is a win for both camps. Sony doesn't have to worry about the middleman, and players get to play exclusives with unique features attached to that platform day 1.
At the expense of having Steam take a cut of your sales and people pushed away from your own platform to buy games 🤔. People can download the launcher, they'll be aight lol.
How can Sony give enough perceived value and a reason to be its own storefront when they can't even sell the PC audience their console? I think some of you have wildly different views of Sony's "prestige" status among PC players. They'll have enough difficulty getting those players to make a PSN account for their games, much less getting them to drop the benefits of an open system and direct them towards their walled garden.
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It's not just a launcher. It's buying into an ecosystem with its own set of (inferior) policies and practices. Also I don't trust Sony with my library. They took away my copy of PT and they allow other publishers to make installation files inaccessible similar to what Ubisoft did with The Crew on uPlay this week. Valve and GOG are the only companies that I know of that's preventing these kinds of shenanigans. Not on Steam or GOG? No thanks.
Apparently Ubisoft started removing The Crew from user accounts
https://twitter.com/accursedfarms/status/1778402114177212513?t=lL1yu_qUgIZEr1DVMv5AsQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/Bioalpha/status/1778422646016737490?t=ERDmSToid9xfnS51p0Unyw&s=19 https://twitter.com/Sen0rEsqueleto/status/1778441016288092487?t=dEDWDXzZXfhPxpWxbRo31w&s=19
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It's 2024
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And people still believe all launchers are equal and Steam is popular for no reason whatsoever and it totally does not have an insane amount of features that no other launcher has.
Sony having their own launcher will piss everyone off, especially if this extra UI ends up being all they need for PS support, making that launcher even more redundant.
PC gamers would be pissed off at losing a bunch of features.
PS5 gamers would be pissed off asking why they have to pay for online and cloud saves while PC gamers don't and they're still getting the games day one.
There is no justification for Sony having their own launcher aside from the 30% not being there, that's it. They would not be doing anyone a favor but themselves.
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And people still believe all launchers are equal and Steam is popular for no reason whatsoever and it totally does not have an insane amount of features that no other launcher has.
Sony having their own launcher will piss everyone off, especially if this extra UI ends up being all they need for PS support, making that launcher even more redundant.
PC gamers would be pissed off at losing a bunch of features.
PS5 gamers would be pissed off asking why they have to pay for online and cloud saves while PC gamers don't and they're still getting the games day one.
There is no justification for Sony having their own launcher aside from the 30% not being there, that's it. They would not be doing anyone a favor but themselves.
I wonder if Sony will retroactively add these features to their already launched PC ports. I remember seeing some PSN backend stuff in Spider-Man's PC port in some report.
This feels like the constant console gamer mentality to the situation, kind of oblivious to what is actually happening with these stores and platforms on PC where the market and wants of players are so vastly different.
Sony started off on Steam for a reason, and beyond even MS, supported every Steam feature off the bat, natively, with exception of Workshop and Marketplace. They knew to appeal to what that subset of customers prefer. Heck, even Helldivers now only provides its updates and patch notes for the whole game directly on Steam.
It's been demonstrated over and over again, it doesn't work because people prefer the feature set and convenience of the platforms they are already on. In particular with Steam, its well established and supports lots of features people love, so they don't move even for a game on a different store that lacks those. There's a reason why all the old "launchers" are pretty much dead and they've all gone back to Steam, GOG etc. Reaching people where they are, even if Valve takes a cut, is more profitable than going it alone and having to invest and maintain infrastructure and features expected of a the evolving PC platforms.
For Sony to develop a PC platform that would actually attract users, it will take more than just the 0% / 20%-30% cut of Valve when using Steam, to get to a good state, AND then take a lot of time to actually push people over and THEN find ways to retain them there as the other PC platforms just keep adding more value. They'd end up putting in more effort than they do on their own console interface and services. People don't even like using publisher launchers like Battlenet anymore. I'd be amused to see the same kind of struggles Xbox has been having with it's PC offering, which is not doing too well.
i do like the fact that they said a bunch of things that MS does already.
That's a big justification from their perspective. Enough so that I wouldn't be surprised if they try it.
They probably know audiences would reject it without any additional benefit, but the benefit they might offer to help make it mutually beneficial would be cross-buy and day-1 releases of major first party single-player games (with Steam still getting versions later). It also keeps them 100% in the Sony ecosystem if the purchases share a PS wallet.
Cross-buy is never happening with a Steam version so whether that customer benefit would be welcomed enough to do well enough in their eyes is questionable.
I mean Sony barely supports half world countries for account registration for example. Even Epic supported basically all countries at launch.
Oh don't get me wrong, I could totally see Sony doing this.
I'm just letting those without PC's know why that'd be a terrible idea.
Excited for this game but I can't say I'm especially psyched about yet another game overlay with yet another achievement tracker. Better than a launcher I guess.
Kinda worried they won't support Steam achievements and other features in the future if they are going all-in on the PS stuff.
But ultimately whatever convinces Sony to bring more of their games to PC, I'm here for it.
Kinda worried they won't support Steam achievements and other features in the future if they are going all-in on the PS stuff.
But ultimately whatever convinces Sony to bring more of their games to PC, I'm here for it.
We have game launchers for Paradox games, CDPR games, and Larian games. We've already seen Sony-styled achievements baked in to HFW.
Having a Sony one matters about 0 percent, honestly, and the idea there will be some massive backlash feels pretty silly.
Having a Sony one matters about 0 percent, honestly, and the idea there will be some massive backlash feels pretty silly.
I'll ask this question again since everyone seems to be afraid of answering it:
What is 100% of 0?
Right… cause that worked out for EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Activision, and even Microsoft.
If (and that's a big if) they offer ALL of said features, perhaps a Sony launcher could have value as a supplemental/alternative to Steam, sure.
But again, them trying to force the issue will go poorly… like it has for literally everyone else. It needs to be optional, similar to the Xbox App.
The spec sheet is all native resolution; PS4 and PS5 use checkerboarding. They are still a little higher than one would expect at least on the Nvidia side (3070 required for PS5 resolution/framerate as opposed to a 6800 for AMD), but without knowing how the settings line up it's hard to say.
Yeah except Activision tried this with Call of Duty and last year they revealed it was a "resounding failure", Microsoft and EA tried it too and came back, Ubisoft is back to bringing their stuff on Steam at a 6 month delay.
We also know from the Epic court docs that the majority of EGS exclusives flopped too, Not sure why people think Sony is gonna do any better. People will just forget their games are on PC after a week.
If I were to choose between late ports or exclusive launcher, later ports win by gigantic margin that is not even funny.
It's a relatively small market by comparison to the PC ecosystem as a whole atm, but if Sony eventually transitions for their games to be still "bought" on Steam, but the installation/management is shunted off to their servers/launcher like EA does with most games, that effectively kills the ease of use for their games on Steam OS, and hence the Steamdeck.
It could even have potential negative performance impacts, since you won't be able to take advantage of Steam's downloadable shader caches - albeit I think all of Sony's games properly precompile their shaders at least (aside from Sackboy at launch) so that's a minimal impact. But the easy of installation/management of Steam vs. other launchers on Linux is worlds apart.
Exactly, we have years of data on this. It's laughable to say Sony making another launcher is a 'win/win', there are obviously significant downsides to both the consumer and the seller by not being on steam, which is why EA/Ubisoft eventually come back. The consumers have spoken.
Not to mention even if the launcher arrives and it turns out to not be a POS, it's yet...another launcher. Another login, another install before you can play the games you bought. It's one thing to say "Eh, it's just another install" when something like Origin debuted and it was EA/Steam, but we're getting close to double-digits now. It became ridiculous a while ago.
It could even have potential negative performance impacts, since you won't be able to take advantage of Steam's downloadable shader caches - albeit I think all of Sony's games properly precompile their shaders at least (aside from Sackboy at launch) so that's a minimal impact. But the easy of installation/management of Steam vs. other launchers on Linux is worlds apart.
Exactly, we have years of data on this. It's laughable to say Sony making another launcher is a 'win/win', there are obviously significant downsides to both the consumer and the seller by not being on steam, which is why EA/Ubisoft eventually come back. The consumers have spoken.
Not to mention even if the launcher arrives and it turns out to not be a POS, it's yet...another launcher. Another login, another install before you can play the games you bought. It's one thing to say "Eh, it's just another install" when something like Origin debuted and it was EA/Steam, but we're getting close to double-digits now. It became ridiculous a while ago.
I would install it for bloodborne
Probably not anything else though
They make more total revenue & profit by giving Valve 20% than they would being exclusive to their own launcher. Which is why after number crunching everyone is coming back to Steam. They also make more profit by releasing ports at the same time and marketing them together instead of marketing one version and then having to market the port afterwards.
Not a great "can't have their cake and eat it too" usage. It's flipped - Sony can't have their cake (get all the money that they desire from PC players) and eat it too (release exclusive to their launcher/platform).
I don't see why you would frame this as "entitled PC players" either. Sony is the one that wants people's money. They aren't entitled to people's money just for being a megacorp locking things down to a worse service. They have to produce something people will pay for in a way people would enjoy paying for it.
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Eh, why introduce this overlay if you're gonna do a launcher?
Either way, I'm fine with a launcher as long as the games stay on Steam (despite how many on this forum push for the opposite)
Absolutely, it would be funny if these levels of denial repression weren't actually pretty sad.
First party PS games are very good video games but on PC there is nothing that separates them from catalouge of great games going 30 years back. Right now more people are playing F:NV then Horizon Forbidden West, and it is not a dig at Horizon which great game and great port.
There is no lull in PC gaming but this forum knows shit about PC gaming.
Fallout games get threads about current resurgence of Fallour games on Steam but no here cares that games like Stardew Valley, Rimworld or Hearts of Iron set their highest concurent players numbers five, six, seven years after being realesed.
People here can't get their heads around that on PC Hearts Of Iron 4 is bigger title then Ghost of Tsushima.
Just earned the plat a month ago on PS5. Really enjoyed it.
It was a loooooooooooooooooong game though, I think it took just over 100 hours to do everything including DLC, which was also quite good.
I didn't try Legends mode so might jump in when the PC launches to experience alongside other newcomers.
It was a loooooooooooooooooong game though, I think it took just over 100 hours to do everything including DLC, which was also quite good.
I didn't try Legends mode so might jump in when the PC launches to experience alongside other newcomers.
No one is responding to it because it's a stupid question, with an answer already given. I've seen more people on here argue that Steam should operate without any formal competitors.
What overlay DOESNT have a launcher at this point?
I really don't see any harm in a launcher if it doesn't get installed with Steam games and games still come to Steam. Playstation is making all the right moves outside of pricing and release date of PC ports. So IF a launcher were to exist, I doubt it would be something Ubisoft Connect.