PC Gaming

I don’t care about it, they can sell to whom they want

Consoles are dying.

Yeah, the PS5 is doing alright, sales-wise. But even its fanboys say 'it has no games.' What they mean is: almost every game is on every relevant platform. Multi-platform development won. Even hardware has to reflect this: Sony and MS had three lockstep releases of nearly-identical AMD laptops. Nintendo's latest money-printing handheld is literally an Nvidia Android tablet.

Everything is a computer now. Some of them are needlessly locked-down.

This market where every game has to be certified and pressed three separate times in different-colored boxes will not last. It is an absurdity. Sony finally recognizes this, after Microsoft starting doing weird shit with the Xbox brand. Because really - the Xbox whatever-it's-called selling half as many units as the PS5 is still a metric shitload of units. Microsoft still has recurring revenue from millions of customers and the apparently-standard one-third gross cut from retail sales. The Xbox is not hurting.

Microsoft is acting weird because the Xbox was always an effort to PC-ify the console market. They aimed for something 360-ish, whiffed, and released a literal Pentium 3 PC. Then they did the 360, as a generic compiler target, and it got all the good ports. It also gave indie developers something novel: money. Once the Xbone launched, the PS3 had recovered, but only by helping PC devs deal with their wonky vector processor. And the Kinect fucked them. But it was already too late: the PS4 was just a PC. The PS4 Pro and PS5 couldn't even tempt gamers to "wait and see" or jump ship for instant gratification, because MS launched similar machines at the same damn time.

Helldivers 2 finally showed Sony how much money they could make, being just a PC publisher. They desperately do not want to be just a PC publisher. Their overreaction is a desperate effort to protect their platform - because being a platform is all they have. They didn't design whiz-bang hardware that allows amazeballs games like nothing else. They don't have Nintendo's damnable first-party appeal. They need their releases other platforms to coerce people into entering the Sony ecosystem.

Meanwhile: Microsoft is teasing Halo on Playstation because it makes no difference to them. Microsoft doesn't give a shit if all the money in a game sale goes to Sony and Valve, so long as the game's running on Windows. They want a market driven by developers, developers, developers, because they know they can dominate it.

The PS5 doesn't have a web browser. What CPU+GPU Sony makes you pay for the PS5? Well, if your PS5 is turn on and you want to check a web page, you'd better take a cheap android phone out (heck, a old blackberry would do) so you can check the website you want to... because your PS5 can't.

Sony, simply, live in another universe... they still have pockets to buy game studios and bribe exclusive in our dimension, but they simply don't actually exist in our reality. That's all I can think about Sony and their commercial practice: they take money from our reality (fewer and fewer each year), but they have no idea why.

I don't particularly care...

It sucks for people that live in countries that Sony doesn't sell to ... but also Sony just doesn't sell to those countries.

Ultimately they made people use an account, something that's long been extremely standard behavior.

I think people are overreacting, particularly those that are in a situation where it's just "create a free account with your throw away email address."

And here, I'm contemplating the PSVR2 as rumors of a PC adapter.

From their perspective it just makes business sense. They're already developing these games for their proprietary platform, putting them on PCs for other platforms is just extra money, forcing them into the PSN network make sense. They don't care if they're leaving money on the table, it's just extra money that they weren't making before.

I don't like this requirement, but I can understand that this is their product and they can do that. The real problem is that I can't even buy these games as Sony isn't selling them in my country. What is more hilarious is that I can get Ghosts of Tsushima or God of War for PS5 on a physical disk, but I can't buy them on Steam. Sony even has official stores where they sell PS5 in some of these countries, including mine. That looks incredibly strange. I wonder what Sony is trying to achieve. Apparently, they think that the end justifies the means. I guess we'll find out soon enough. I'd bet on an independent PC store.

You missed the main issue my friend, it's not about having a launcher or an account, it's the way their doing it.

Rockstar, EA, Ubisoft, Epic, Blizzard and probably some more all make you use their launcher/account as well. Sony doing it is no different. Doesn’t make it the nice thing to do but it’s the sad reality of PC gaming. The price of flexibility is having to deal with tons of accounts (or piracy).

I think it's a stupid hill to die on. You have EA, Ubisoft, Epic, gog, steam, and even 2k and GTA accounts but this is where you draw the line? Come on, that's just stupid. I would also point out that those also have games that not only require the associated account but also the associated launcher and for single player games.

I get that there are people that can't purchase the games due to region restrictions on psn accounts, but this is quite possibly the most hypocritical and idiotic circle jerk I've ever seen in PC gaming.

More sick of outrage bait title gore where everything is either a slam or a "forced down throat" personally. But it is annoying.