Former PlayStation boss thinks Sony’s PC ports U-turn doesn’t make much sense
Shawn Layden argues late ports didn’t harm PlayStation’s console business
Former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden has said he doesn’t understand Sony’s decision to pull back from PC, because he doesn’t believe late ports were costing its console business sales.
Layden was chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios until late 2019, shortly after which PlayStation brought its first major release to PC, Horizon Zero Dawn.
Ever since, PlayStation has ported most of its major releases to PC, around a year or more after their debut on PS5. However, following diminishing sales and existential threats from portable PCs, it is reportedly stopping PC ports entirely.
Speaking to the PSI podcast, Layden defended his initial decision to bring PlayStation games to PC and suggested that he didn’t understand why Sony was seemingly walking back on the platform, since he didn’t believe late ports cost it sales.
“First of all, the games don’t go on PC for like a year or whatever it is. It’s not day and date,” he said. “And if they think that a game coming out 18 months after its launch on another platform somehow stopped a sale from happening 18 months ago in the hardware business, I would like to see how they can prove that thesis.
“You can feel that is true [but] I don’t happen to feel that’s true. If someone’s waiting 18 months for something to come on PC, we didn’t lose a sale to them. They weren’t going to buy the hardware anyway.”
The former PlayStation exec said he didn’t know why Sony would have made the decision, but theorized that the cost of distraction of making PC versions had potentially become too great.
Defending his decision to start bringing PlayStation games to PC nearly a decade ago, Layden argued that the core value for SIE was never the additional sales.
“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about my decision to put games on PC,” he said. “I think exclusivity is very important to a platform business. That’s how you differentiate. If you want Zelda, you go to Nintendo. If you need Mario, that’s where you go, that’s where you find it.
“And at the PlayStation business, we did exclusivity throughout PS1, PS2, PS3, that was just the standard of the day. We had Japanese companies who would be exclusive to the PlayStation platform, through our relationships with them. And so that became the standard way you sold the platform.”
He added: “Moving into PC or multi-platform releases is really about two things. 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?
“How do I get the world of Horizon to be seen by people who aren’t in the PlayStation world? Not necessarily because they’re going to buy a PlayStation, I wasn’t that crazy. I didn’t think that was going to happen.
“But as we take our intellectual property across other media, whether it’s into films or it’s in television or in comic books or into merchandise you need to have as many eyeballs that are aware of this character, of this story.”
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