Open world zombie slaughter sim Days Gone will be the latest first-party Sony game to get ported to PC, British GQ reports in a new interview with Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Jim Ryan. The news was later confirmed on Twitter by Days Gone maker Sony Bend Studio.
“What about PlayStation games on PC? A whole slate of them is on the way starting with Days Gone this [autumn],” the magazine writes. Sony began bringing its coveted PS4-exclusives to PC last July with Death Stranding, followed in August by Horizon Zero Dawn. The company announced in an investor call around the same time that it would continue to “explore” bringing first-party games to the platform, and Bend Studio’s 2019 third-person action game will be next.
[referenced id=”907642″ url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/04/days-gone-the-kotaku-review/” thumb=”https://www.gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/04/25/zidwsvlelpazppjfhzax.jpg” title=”Days Gone: The Kotaku Review” excerpt=”It’s worthwhile to think about the number of people around you who are waiting for the world to end. There are people who must do it for a living: government employees who specialise in disaster relief and crisis response, civil engineers, military personnel — people who must imagine the end to make…”]
While Ryan didn’t explicitly mention Days Gone in the magazine’s transcribed interview, he did speak more generally about the company’s change of heart when it comes to making its exclusives available elsewhere:
I think a few things changed. We find ourselves now in early 2021 with our development studios and the games that they make in better shape than they’ve ever been before. Particularly from the latter half of the PS4 cycle our studios made some wonderful, great games. There’s an opportunity to expose those great games to a wider audience and recognise the economics of game development, which are not always straightforward. The cost of making games goes up with each cycle, as the calibre of the IP has improved. Also, our ease of making it available to non-console owners has grown. So it’s a fairly straightforward decision for us to make.
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We assessed the exercise in two ways. Firstly, in terms of the straightforward success of the activity of publishing the game on PC, people liked it and they bought it. We also looked at it through the lens of what the PlayStation community thought about it. There was no massive adverse reaction to it. So we will continue to take mission steps in this direction.
PlayStation rival Microsoft has also been bringing its first-party lineup to PC marketplaces like Steam, announcing earlier this month that Forza Horizon 4 would be joining Sea of Thieves and Gears 5 there in March. The trend seems to be part of a growing realisation that consoles don’t directly compete with the PC gaming audience, and the only way to reach many of those players is by meeting them where they already are. Microsoft revealed last summer that Sea of Thieves sold an additional 1 million copies in the first couple of months after it came to Steam.
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