Horizon Forbidden West is one of the most graphically impressive games to be released to date. That’s a fantastic outcome considering that Guerilla Games had to make sure that it ran well enough on the PlayStation 4 while being pretty enough to warrant a PlayStation 5 playthrough. The result is a stunning and well-optimized game that, on PC, looks even better.
Unfortunately, as much as most PC gamers would like to have nice things such as Horizon Forbidden West at the same time it launches on PlayStation, there’s a reason why this will never happen.
Save for Helldivers 2, which is more of an outlier than the norm, Sony has followed a 1-2 year gap between the release of an exclusive title on its bespoke platform and PC since establishing PlayStation Studios three years ago. But Sony Chairman Hiroki Totoki recently hinted at a potential strategy change, which might either see shorter gaps or more frequent releases, possibly with Sony tapping older PS4 titles.
Already, we’re seeing evidence of the latter. Only two months separate the latest PC port in Horizon Forbidden West and Ghost of Tsushima, with Until Dawn expected to arrive either in August or in December.
Now that Sony is open to releasing more PC ports of its first-party exclusives frequently, does this mean that its future single-player AAA titles might follow the same route as Helldivers 2? Not quite.
Video game piracy remains a real issue to this day and Horizon Forbidden West is one of its latest victims. According to @PC_Focus_ on Twitter, popular piracy scene group, Fairlight, took 30 seconds to “crack” the PC port of the 2022 GOTY nominee.
Horizon Forbidden West has been CRACKED by Fairlight
In 30 seconds after release pic.twitter.com/mWpDH3nq7D
— PC_Focus 🔴🏴☠️ (@PC_Focus_) March 21, 2024
The main reason why Sony (or any company, for that matter) staggers the release of its PC ports is to maximize their lifetime sales. Ideally, a PlayStation exclusive only comes to the PC platform once it has exhausted the majority of its playerbase on the PS4 and PS5. Piracy cuts this cycle short.
We don’t have Horizon Forbidden West‘s launch numbers, but Sony confirmed that the franchise was at 8.4 million fourteen months post-launch.
In addition, last year’s leaked documents showed that adding it to PS Plus further cannibalized sales, which caused it to flatline. We can only assume this means that the sequel hasn’t reached the 10 million mark yet. Otherwise, Sony or Guerilla would’ve let us known. Still, we can assume that the Burning Shores DLC added to the game’s bottom line.
With AAA games costing so much these days, every penny counts. For Sony, this means squeezing out as much as it can from Horizon Forbidden West. The best way to do it for Sony was to wait another six months to release Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition on PS5.
Surely, this generated further revenue for the holiday season. By which point following its release, Sony couldn’t care any less about the pirates anymore.
This isn’t to say that the PC sales of PlayStation ports aren’t good. They’re high relative to the minimal effort needed to make them happen. However, it’s clear that Sony ranks them below expansions and PS5 enhanced versions. Then again, this was then. Who knows? Maybe Totoki was hinting at PC ports replacing PS5 versions of PS4 titles in the sales pipeline in his earlier statement. It’s possible as most games now are exclusive to current-gen consoles.
Ultimately, waiting until the numbers stop growing is ideal for Sony. It gives a relatively untapped audience a taste of the single-player AAA Sony experience and asks them to either wait 1-2 years for a game to come to the PC or buy a PlayStation 5 now and enjoy them at launch.
Given the way a game like Horizon Forbidden West ends on a cliffhanger, what are the chances that a small percentage of first-time PC players pony up for a PlayStation 5 in anticipation for the third game? It’s small, but it’s not zero.
TLDR; there’s no incentive for Sony to risk a huge chunk of its video game sales sales unless we’re talking about live-service titles, which are inherently protected from piracy.
As a bonus, Sony gets internet points for not stuffing Horizon Forbidden West with a universally reviled anti-piracy software that may or may not bog down a game’s performance on PC.
