After seeing the re-uploaded trailers from yesterday’s big PS5 thing, I noticed that while all the games would be coming to PS5, only a handful seem to be specific to the PS5 only. A significant number are also noted to be coming to PC in some form, and a portion of those are also coming to PS4. Since it seems to be industry tradition that exclusives sell a platform, I’m wondering about how strongly they intend to have the PS5 work out, and likewise the Sexbox with its whole “also on Microsoft Store if you have Windows 10” thing paired with trying to enforce backwards compatibility for existing Xbone owners, despite whatever EA is trying to do.
Going back over the re-uploaded trailers (not the ones from the stream directly), looking at the ones that claimed to be “PlayStation exclusive” but also mentioned PC, I did a quick set of searches to see just what PC platform those games would release on, if there were any other exclusivity layers involved, because I had wondered about a supposed theory that Sony had been working with Epic to secure their games to that platform. That theory already seemed flimsy given the PC release targets for both Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding include Steam, but I did want to also look into what some articles were reporting as well.
Looking at the games also coming to both PS5 and PS4, there generally seems to be more of a confirmed state as these games are more likely further along in development, given the supposed existence of PS4 versions. I counted seven total games in this category. Four seem to be signed to Epic exclusively: Bugsnax (some kind of puppet fruit body horror) and Jett: The Far Shore (something about nomads going to space) are the new announcements, while Oddworld Soulstorm and Solar Ash seemed to have been announced to do so before this presentation. Two games have Steam pages: Goodbye Volcano High (dinosaur anime) and Stray (playable cat in robot world), but the presence of a Steam page means it’ll probably eventually release there, if it’s not launched there initially. The last game, Little Devil Inside, seems to have been Kickstarted years ago, to the point where the Wii U was listed as a stretch goal. The question is despite listing a Steam release in the list of platforms, if it’ll still come out there, because this has been proven false with several other crowdfunded games. Another question is if there will be a Switch release at all instead of the Wii U one, unless some publisher does a weird thing and releases there too. And if it does release on a Nintendo system, if it’ll be significantly delayed outside of the PlayStation console exclusive period.
For the PS5 and PC games, there’s a lot more up in the air. Only two of the five games seem specifically confirmed for Epic: Godfall and Kena: Bridge of Spirits (Pixar’s Pikmin 4 or something like it). The other three seem to still not be finalized, but as far as Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, since those are published by Bethesda, they could either come to Bethesda’s own launcher or another platform, such as Steam, given how they seem to be bringing things there still. Perhaps both, and hopefully not a nested launcher situation either. That leaves Square Enix’s latest “project” game currently called Project Athia, which seems so early in development that it doesn’t even have a name yet. If it turns out to be another Final Fantasy that was initially vaguely based around Final Fantasy 13 like their other recent offerings in the series, or maybe based on some old tech demo, then at least that gives it a bit more ground to come out. Being so early on, of course they haven’t settled on a PC platform to sell on. Maybe it’ll just be through their own store somehow.
The long and short of this is really just seeing what’s coming out that might be playable on PC, considering my attitude toward the idea of new consoles at this point when graphics have nearly peaked to the average eye, to where they’re actually close to par with animated film quality. Even if I’d need a new PC to run anything here, it can at least do a lot of things. Plus, considering the odd moral considerations with regards to what PC store games come from which is somehow a problem at this point, even though I’d really love more games showing up on DRM-free stores regardless. And on any platform, ideally remembering to remove the Denuvo thing once it’s served its alleged purpose, since big publishers still seem big on that software, just to free up any extra CPU cycles and whatnot.