Data Shows Sony Made Good Money on Steam, Then May Have Realized PC Gamers Don’t Need a PlayStation https://respawnfirst.com/data-shows-...a-playstation/

"PlayStation Sold Millions of Games to PC Players But Failed to Sell them the Ecosystem.

For the past few years, PC gamers were forced to act like patience was the ultimate PlayStation accessory. There was no need to grab a PS5 to play God of War, Spider Man, Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, Ghost of Tsushima, and The Last of Us. All you needed was a decent enough rig, a Steam account, and of course, a lot of patience.

That may be exactly why Sony is planning on pulling back from PC.

According to data from Alinea Analytics, PlayStation Studios games made more than $1.5B in gross revenue on Steam. After Valve’s cut, Sony made $1.2B while overall PlayStation ports sold roughly 43M copies on Steam. That is not a failed experiment, in fact, it is a reminder that PC players will buy PlayStation’s blockbuster IPs when Sony lets them.

The biggest success for PlayStation on PC was Helldivers 2, which sold an estimated 12.7M copies on Steam and made Sony $400 million in gross revenue. Even more telling, Alinea data shows the co-op shooter sold more than twice many copies on Steam as it did on Sony’s own platform, PS5.
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But the same data also shows a clear problem. The novelty of PlayStation is fading on PC.

Alinea found that God of War sold 2.5M copies after 427 days on Steam. That is more than 2.5 times what Ragnarok sold in the same launch aligned window. Data shows only 13 percent of God of War players played Ragnarok as well. Spider Man is not different. After 294 days, the game sold 1.4M copies on Steam, more than twice as many as Spider Man 2 on Steam in the same timeframe.

Less than 12 percent Spider Man players played the sequel on Steam. That’s doesn’t necessarily mean PlayStation is struggling on PC. Ragnarok made $45M on Steam while Spider Man Remastered made $32M. Not a bad number but money is not the only goal here. Sony wants to sell boxes, PS Plus subscriptions, the controllers, and its entire ecosystem as well as the idea that Sony’s blockbuster games are a reason to own a PlayStation."