After drawing many months of ire from PC players over the practice, Sony PlayStation has now reportedly removed regional restrictions on their titles from PC sales platforms like Steam.
In recent years, Sony began releasing ports of formerly PlayStation exclusive games. Though at least two years (or often more) after the game’s release on console, titles like “God of War,” “Marvel’s Spider-Man,” and “Horizon: Zero Dawn” were hits on PC even as some ports went smoother than others. Sales, though only a fraction of that on console, were robust enough the studio wanted to continue the initiative.
The issue began early last year when “Helldivers 2” launched to great success on PC. Sony made the decision shortly after launch to try and force players to make a PSN account to continue playing the game – a problem considering PSN isn’t available in over 170 countries around the world.
That led to intense review bombing of the title to such a degree that Sony backpedalled and chose not to implement its PSN requirement on that game. What it did do is delist “Helldivers 2” from sale in those countries that don’t have PSN. Since then, all other PlayStation releases on PC have been unavailable in those same territories, and those where it was available had PSN requirements.
In January, Sony pulled the PSN requirements from its single player games – but the region locks remained in place. That continued until this past Friday when users in several of those locked out regions started noticing recent ports like “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2,” “The Last of Us Part II” and “God of War Ragnarok” were suddenly available.
Only seven countries reportedly still remain on the blacklist – Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Vietnam (the latter banned Steam entirely in 2024).
The news comes as former PS5 exclusive “Stellar Blade” has been doing very robust concurrent player counts on the Steam charts where the title hit a peak of 192,078 concurrent players in the past day or so – making it one of the top performing games on the storefront.
While that’s all good news, it comes with a small dash of bad. Speaking during a Sony business segment meeting on Friday (via VGC), PlayStation’s studios boss Hermen Hulst has indicated Sony may be more conservative with its rollout of PS5 titles on other platforms in order to protect the console brand:
“It’s important to realize that we’re really thoughtful about bringing our franchises off console to reach new audiences and that we’re taking a very measured, very deliberate approach in doing that. Particularly on the single-player side, our tentpole titles, they’re such a differentiator.
The point of differentiation, I should say, for the PlayStation console, is that they will showcase the performance and the quality of the hardware. So we want to ensure that players get the best experience from these titles. We’re very thoughtful about how and if and how we bring these titles to other platforms.”
Originally, Sony was pushing at least a two-year delay between console and PC releases for those big-budget single-player titles. That number that has shrunk to a little over a year recently (as seen with “Stellar Blade”), but now may go back up again as the company goes more conservative with their ports.
Source: Windows Central
