Sony Is Finally Letting PlayStation Embrace The Second Platform

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Ah yes, time to rejoice, my fellow PC brethren. The era of console exclusivity is dying down now, it's only a matter of time before Nintendo joins in too. And on the further side of the horizon, major companies like Google and Amazon want in on the platform action too, only doing so in cloud for now. This isn't just the case of console exclusivity going away, releasing it on a superior platform gives so much freedom to work with, it'll help the industry grow as well.

Over a year ago, I sold my PS4. Because of personal life problems that I was undergoing at the time. Kind of a big mistake because compared to the price I gave it away for, it kind of ballooned up a little in the market now. So I'd hope to wait till it goes down or save enough to get a PS5. Not happening anytime soon.

So the best news I guess I hear now is that Spider-Man remastered, which was first released in 2018 as a PS exclusive, is finally coming for the PC in August. I did a review on this, and I sang praises about its gameplay and exploration. It still holds and even better, Miles Morales is also coming over as well. Though that game is slated for a later release this year.

Yes, PS4 owners are going to be disappointed about this. Then again, some of these games are like 3-4 years old already, and most people have played them. What I want to discuss is implications for the future of the gaming industry, mostly in a good way.

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Superior Platform

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So riddle me this, what was the best-selling game for Sony when they were releasing a majority of games on PC? Death Stranding? God of War? Horizon Zero Dawn? Yes. Zero Dawn was selling well, despite the fact that God of War was a familiar IP. A big reason for that is because it's an open world game that works with both KB+M.

On the forefront of game sales, Sony sees this as a net positive, and are expecting to port out even more games in the foreseeable future. Ghost of Tsushima might be the next one releasing, we can definitely be sure about that. Imagine the release window shrinking from 3-4 years to 2 years, maybe.

Sony sees higher earnings as more games keep getting released yearly. They're projecting to earning over 300 million this year, after last year got them over 80 million.

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But there are bigger benefits to having it on this platform. Multiple ones being like able to play any of Sony's games on our PCs, checking out how well Sony's in-house game engines fare in our systems. For technical reasons, even like trying to understand the rendering methods and technique. Stuff that Digital Foundry is into. This will help both sides, as Sony could also gather reliable data from how PC users would play and easily allows programmers in general to have access for research purposes.

And since we're talking about programming, the modding community can go crazy with these games. Modifying various attributes like how much damage can be done, adding more enemies to the screen, tampering with character models, etc. The mileage here varies pretty much, long as players have the freedom they want, long as they own a licensed copy of the games. Hopefully Sony doesn't pull a Take Two takedown for just that alone.

The modding alone could catapult Spider-Man's popularity in Steam alone. That game is already famous for its iconic superhero namesake, imagine the things they can do with it. We might get even crazier costumes mods to try out when all said and done.

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Excited For What's More To Come

Uncharted Legacy Collection, which comes with both Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy spin-off, release for the PS5, now has a Steam page. Some indications giving off that it'll have a release somewhere this year. Meaning this will be the third PlayStation exclusive that got ported. But it gets even better.

https://twitter.com/JoeMiller101/status/1532448860689293313?s=20&t=Gtshhcx5012TUdARLLX79w

The following screenshots have been leaked, which showcases the menu with PC button prompts. Configuring PC button input could have to do with the console's support for the peripherals, but the graphics menu showcasing various options pretty much seals the deal. Both Sack Boy: A Big Adventure, and Returnal could get a release window probably next year or earlier. These games are PS5 exclusives.

There are Dualsense 5 support for multiple third-party games even, I like that not only can you use it on the PS5, and that the features are not exclusive to that platform. But that it is slowly becoming readily available for use in PC with every features that comes with it like haptic feedback and adaptive triggers.

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Understandably, some people will be upset, but that doesn't mean PlayStation is going to die out. Mainly as a system platform. People are still buying the Xbox Series X, because the consoles provide many conveniences. I am glad Sony is doing this, they finally see how much Microsoft has been benefitting from this the entire time.

Plus, with the rise of hardware costs, and difficulties with stock, this would be a temporary relief from all that hassle. I can hope that Sony would cut down the PS5 price this year, but seeing how far costs have gotten up, I kind of doubt that will happen anytime soon.