PlayStation is a brand that was built off of its exclusivity. Its award-winning franchises are what made the company reign supreme over rival companies such as Xbox and Nintendo. This allowed the PlayStation two to become the best-selling console of all time. Recently it was announced that some of the brand’s fan-favorite exclusives will be hitting the shelves on other platforms.

Shawn Layden, the former CEO of Sony, stated, “Why not take one of our top-selling games, which has already blown up the marketplace, already been out there for 18 months, 24 months…and bring that to the personal computer platform? Hopefully, with that, people who are not currently inside the universe of PlayStation get a chance to experience what we’re experiencing, Also our ease of making it available to non-console owners has grown. So it’s a fairly straightforward decision for us to make.”

Recently Game of the Year franchises God of War and the Last of Us have been released to PC platforms just earlier this week. It came as a shock that many of the games previously offered on PS exclusively would be released on other platforms.

SIE boss Jim Ryan continued, “We find ourselves now in early 2021 with our development studios and the games that they make in better shape than they’ve ever been before. Particularly from the latter half of the PS4 cycle, our studios made some wonderful, great games. There’s an opportunity to expose those great games to a wider audience and recognize the economics of game development.”

This doesn’t mean that the upcoming games are also going to be available to other platforms. PlayStation plans to only release older exclusives that had their release on the PS4. New upcoming awaited games such as God of War: Ragnorak will debut on the PS5 in mid-2022 along with numerous other scheduled exclusives. 

This strategy is a part of Sony’s new interest campaign which tries to lure more customers to enter the PlayStation realm. By releasing old masterpieces such as God of War, Sony intends to increase sales by nearly 250%. Commercially, this may be the right move for Sony, but in regards to its audience, the PlayStation community does not agree with exclusives being released to other platforms. Many cite these exclusives as the main things that differentiate the PlayStation from its competitors. Without it, Sony wouldn’t hold any advantages over the Xbox, which holds higher processing stats than the PS5. In the newest generation, Xbox has upped their newest release, the Xbox series X.

The Series X possesses processing statistics that more merely resemble that of PC processing figures which is even capable of running and streaming at an 8K output. However due to their lack of a sustainable fanbase and less than desirable exclusives the PS5 still holds an edge over the numerically advanced Xbox. 

Although unclear what Sony will do in regards to releasing new exclusives in the future, this is certainly just the beginning of its expansion. For many Barstow students still on the fence about the PlayStation, the new release can offer the perfect opportunity to see exactly what the PlayStation franchise can offer.