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Is Sony missing out on PC sales by releasing too many games at once?

Midn1ght

Member
Or is it something else?

Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection launched on PC this past Wednesday and it seems that among all the ports they've released so far, Uncharted has had the worst results when it comes to launch numbers. I'm backing up this claim by looking at the Steam all-time peak results which are low for Uncharted.
5ayIfuj.jpeg

It could also be that releasing the game in the middle of the week is not giving us an accurate view of how many copies were sold. If my memory is right, every other games launched on a Friday which usually gives us a better idea of how successful a launch was on Steam since most people play during the weekend.

But there's also the fact that Sony is releasing 3 first party titles on PC within a month which might not be the best idea.

Spiderman: 12 August 2022
Uncharted : 19 October 2022
Sackboy: 27 October 2022
Miles Morales: 18 November 2022

I personally don't have an unlimited budget for gaming and when it comes to these games, I had to make a choice. I definitely want to get my hands on both Spiderman and absolutely loved Sackboy on PS5 but at the end I went with Uncharted and will pass on all the others for the time being. I'm sure I'm not alone and I just wonder why Sony is releasing all of these games in such a short period of times. Sackboy probably won't sell well next week which is a damn shame.

I'm not forgetting that Uncharted 4 is a 2016 games and was free on PlayStation of course but still.

I obviously enjoy the fact that their games are coming to PC but their strategy and marketing feels weird and rushed to me.

Thoughts?
 

yurinka

Member
Or is it something else?

Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection launched on PC this past Wednesday and it seems that among all the ports they've released so far, Uncharted has had the worst results when it comes to launch numbers. I'm backing up this claim by looking at the Steam all-time peak results which are low for Uncharted.
5ayIfuj.jpeg

It could also be that releasing the game in the middle of the week is not giving us an accurate view of how many copies were sold. If my memory is right, every other games launched on a Friday which usually gives us a better idea of how successful a launch was on Steam since most people play during the weekend.

But there's also the fact that Sony is releasing 3 first party titles on PC within a month which might not be the best idea.

Spiderman: 12 August 2022
Uncharted : 19 October 2022
Sackboy: 27 October 2022
Miles Morales: 18 November 2022

I personally don't have an unlimited budget for gaming and when it comes to these games, I had to make a choice. I definitely want to get my hands on both Spiderman and absolutely loved Sackboy on PS5 but at the end I went with Uncharted and will pass on all the others for the time being. I'm sure I'm not alone and I just wonder why Sony is releasing all of these games in such a short period of times. Sackboy probably won't sell well next week which is a damn shame.

I'm not forgetting that Uncharted 4 is a 2016 games and was free on PlayStation of course but still.

I obviously enjoy the fact that their games are coming to PC but their strategy and marketing feels weird and rushed to me.

Thoughts?
It's still too early to analyze the Uncharted numbers, first because the Steam numbers need a few days to be properly tracked and second because the "all-time peak" of users is typically achieved during the first week, specially during the weekend.

We also have to consider the period of the year. Now we're in late October, the period of the year where there is the biggest amount of competition. While other Sony PC ports were released on other parts of the year with less competition (like GoW, released in January or Horizon, released in August).

We also have to remember that concurrent users is not the same than sales, and that in PC a higher portion of the sales, like around half of them are done while the game is discounted. In this case, Uncharted 4 is a 6 years and half old game and Lost Legacy a 5 years old game being sold at 50 bucks. So pretty likely many people will buy now new games and keep these Uncharted ones for later.

It will make more sense to analize the performance of these ports months or even years later after their release, specially after big discounts.
 
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poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
There is definitely some kind of plan that Sony is executing on. Releasing this many games in a short period of time is definitely unusual even if the PC market isn't as frontloaded as much as consoles.
 

feynoob

Banned
Steam chart.
Mate I bought HZD and I haven't launched it on PC. Even God of war is kinda clunky on my system.

Until I get new system for my pc, I won't be able to play them. But still I would buy them.

That is what Sony is looking at. People who bought the gam3. Not the chart.
 

OceanGaming

Member
No.

I am myself a PC Gamer, and i can say the chief reason why.

I AM NOT GOING TO START READING A BOOK SERIES FROM THE LAST BOOK OF THE SERIES AND A COMPANION BOOK TO GO ALONG WITH THE SERIES. I START FROM THE F I R S T BOOK WHEN I READ.

The smart ones amongst you will immediately understand what i mean. Sony did a big mistake about Uncharted and i will be proven right when LoUP1 will do about Horizon numbers at launch, AT LEAST.
 
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geary

Member
They said at a moment in time that in the second half of 2022 will release a bunch of games. And they kind bet their financial target on this.
 

KungFucius

King Snowflake
One odd aspect of PC gaming is that people in the market for ne GPUs might abstain from gaming until they get it. I know I am. I want to play Lost Legacy and Plague Tale but I am waiting on a 4090 and also GoW drops in 2 weeks. I played UC4 so the bundle isn't super attractive. Its probably gonna be GoWR, then a bunch of gamepass games on PC for me until 2023.

I don't see how they are releasing too many. It is not like people have a quota for Sony games and that they are all the same or something. They do have choices though. Right now they are not as good as most years, but there tend to be a lot of new games this time of year.
 

Jaybe

Member
  1. Oldest Sony title released and quite a gap from launch to release date.
  2. Competition. This week has many releases. Persona 5 Royale, A Plague Tale Requiem, Gotham Knights, COD MW2’s campaign.
  3. Give it a week or two to achieve its peak. It may not go higher and it will be less than the others but it may close the gap a bit.
  4. Starting at Uncharted 4 probably wasn’t the best and may turn off people.
  5. There is a long tail of sales to be made on 20%, 50%, and long down the line 75% off sales and Sony publisher bundles. Maybe they want it out before the Winter Sale event and give it a little drop.
  6. If they do anything else Uncharted, and close the release gap, then it will help the released game and Uncharted 4.
 
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EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
No Sony isn’t “missing out on sales” we got god of war mix in vr, games all over the place on PC and they’ll continue AAA production.
 
  1. Oldest Sony title released and quite a gap from launch to release date.
  2. Competition. This week has many releases. Persona 5 Royale, A Plague Tale Requiem, Gotham Knights, COD MW2’s campaign.
  3. Give it a week or two to achieve its peak. It may not go higher and it will be less than the others but it may close the gap a bit.
  4. Starting at Uncharted 4 probably wasn’t the best and may turn off people.
  5. There is a long tail of sales to be made on 20%, 50%, and long down the line 75% off sales and Sony publisher bundles. Maybe they want it out before the Winter Sale event and give it a little drop.
  6. If they do anything else Uncharted, and close the release gap, then it will help the released game and Uncharted 4.
This essentially covers everything.
 
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What I'll add is that they should step up their porting game to attract more day one players. The currents state of Sony doing below average ports would make some people wait until the games get fully patched later on.
 
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chixdiggit

Member
Uncharted will do fine on PC long term IMO. Bad price point for two old games going against stiff competition like COD and Persona.
 
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I agree with the OP in so far as I too have a limited budget at the moment and am having to hold off on some purchases.

I'd probably have picked up Uncharted on pc, but I'm waiting for MW2 and that will be full AAA retail price.

Then, GoW Ragnarok later on, plus I still have quite a backlog to be getting on with anyway.
 
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kyliethicc

Member
  1. Oldest Sony title released and quite a gap from launch to release date.
  2. Competition. This week has many releases. Persona 5 Royale, A Plague Tale Requiem, Gotham Knights, COD MW2’s campaign.
  3. Give it a week or two to achieve its peak. It may not go higher and it will be less than the others but it may close the gap a bit.
  4. Starting at Uncharted 4 probably wasn’t the best and may turn off people.
  5. There is a long tail of sales to be made on 20%, 50%, and long down the line 75% off sales and Sony publisher bundles. Maybe they want it out before the Winter Sale event and give it a little drop.
  6. If they do anything else Uncharted, and close the release gap, then it will help the released game and Uncharted 4.
I'd also add 7 - poor marketing. They took 13 months or so to ship the port from reveal and barely mentioned it in the time. There were even several previous delayed/fake release dates. Probably lost many people's interest waiting too long.

And also, 8 - what are apparently valid concerns about Iron Galaxy as a port house.
 

GhostOfTsu

Banned
The novelty of playing a Playstation exclusive on PC is over. Now it's just "oh it's that PS4 game".

The same thing will happen to Nintendo if they ever do it. The first one will be a big event and sell like crazy and then it will be like any regular game.

Multiplatforms games come out everyday, no one cares.
 
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poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
There are no such numbers, but it's easy to guess it's around +500K to 3 millions for the first days considering the sales.
Are you helping MS on their data for the CMA application by any chance?
 
Yeah, I think Uncharted kinda flopped on PC. Sony should release games that makes sense for PC. Dreams, Ghost of Tsushima, etc. Still think The Last of Us 1 is gonna do better than Uncharted on PC tho.
 
PC gamers generally don't gravitate towards high difficulty games, even more so when they are cinematic.

Well some pc gamers are using trainers to play games. Believe, there are people using trainer to play Uncharted....


wtf GIF
 

ACESHIGH

Banned
Their PC ports are:

Expensive

Unoptimized. Broken at worst bar some exceptions like days gone. Folks have learned to wait at least a month or 2 if not more before purchasing until the game is fixed. The good thing is that they seem to care and work on fixing their games. But their upcoming games should have better quality on day one.

They have released lots of games in a pretty crowded time of the year. So of course sales would be canibalized.

The cinematic experience type games do not bode well with PC gamers. And uncharted does not even include the multiplayer mode. Plus they should have released the trilogy first.
Also regarding uncharted in particular, they are excluding a significant subset of PC gamers with FX,Sandy bridge or ivy bridge processors that could play all the other Sony releases just fine thanks to the idiotic AVX2 requirement.

They know what to do if they aim to break the 100k peak releasing the 2 souls likes from their back catalog but are too retarded to do it.
 
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Holammer

Member
That would be a problem if they were the only game in town at the company store. They're not and customers have wildly divergent tastes.
Sony's current problem IMO, is that they don't set a price early on and allow pre-orders. It kills the hype machine when they just slap a price on it at the last second and kick them out the door screaming. It's not a problem exclusive to Sony mind, they need to wine and dine prospective customers with trailers, set a date and communicate with them. Talk dirty!
"Here's a 15% pre-order discount big boy!"
 
Or is it something else?

Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection launched on PC this past Wednesday and it seems that among all the ports they've released so far, Uncharted has had the worst results when it comes to launch numbers. I'm backing up this claim by looking at the Steam all-time peak results which are low for Uncharted.
5ayIfuj.jpeg

It could also be that releasing the game in the middle of the week is not giving us an accurate view of how many copies were sold. If my memory is right, every other games launched on a Friday which usually gives us a better idea of how successful a launch was on Steam since most people play during the weekend.

But there's also the fact that Sony is releasing 3 first party titles on PC within a month which might not be the best idea.

Spiderman: 12 August 2022
Uncharted : 19 October 2022
Sackboy: 27 October 2022
Miles Morales: 18 November 2022

I personally don't have an unlimited budget for gaming and when it comes to these games, I had to make a choice. I definitely want to get my hands on both Spiderman and absolutely loved Sackboy on PS5 but at the end I went with Uncharted and will pass on all the others for the time being. I'm sure I'm not alone and I just wonder why Sony is releasing all of these games in such a short period of times. Sackboy probably won't sell well next week which is a damn shame.

I'm not forgetting that Uncharted 4 is a 2016 games and was free on PlayStation of course but still.

I obviously enjoy the fact that their games are coming to PC but their strategy and marketing feels weird and rushed to me.

Thoughts?

There was no marketing for the thing, and i don't even know what the other one is. Though the price is good, another problem is that you have to question the logic of starting with the 4th entry in the series that's often described as the worst. The hell would i get it? All in all, it was obvious that it would fail, tho it still is pulling good numbers that surprise me.

I think this is actually pretty good number for so old game

Nah, that doesn't fly on PC. There are about a dozen or so games which are much older and are pulling double or more consistently. If the game is good, there is strong longevity. The modding community for the original Doom & Doom II is still huge 28+ years later.
 
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