Between Sony’s decision to rebrand PlayStation Network (PSN) into, uh, something else later this year and the statements its been making regarding PC as a platform, there hasn’t been a lot for fans to celebrate this year. One thing that likely will be nice, though, is that Sony doesn’t appear to be interested in making its own launcher for the games it does decide to publish on the platform. Whether there’ll be that many games is anyone’s guess, but at least they’ll be able to go through Steam or GOG like usual to play them.

It should be noted, first-off, that all of this is still heresay for the most part. Sony has expressed a disinterest in releasing its first-party titles on PC and it has announced plans to rebrand PSN, but it hasn’t yet said anything about what exactly any of this will look like. This latest rumor, reported by TwistedVoxel, is based off of Sony’s comments about backing away from PC and comments made by a suppsedly credible source on ResetEra in a conversation with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. The long and short of it is that, well, a PC launcher is not likely to be part of the rebrand. That’s it.

So yeah, it’s basically a nonstory, but I wanted to comment on it, because the whole situation is rather interesting. Sony was, for at least a couple of years, acting as though it finally understood the value of PC as a platform and was steadily releasing more first-party titles through the likes of Steam and GOG. However, it seems to me that their primary motivation for doing so wasn’t to sell more copies of their games but rather to get more users into the PSN ecosystem. When that didn’t really work out (just look at what happened with Helldivers II), their interest seemed to start fading.

On one hand, I get it. The entire reason to choose one console platform over another are the games that you can only play there. The crazy lack of them is a big part of the reason why Xbox has been struggling as a platform over the past decade. Yet, console and PC are two separate things for the most part.

Either you enjoy the convenience of a dedicated console and the ability to play from your couch or you enjoy the high-end perks of PC. People who have both aren’t overly common, and people tend to choose between the two based on how they want to play, not because of what games are available. So it seems unlikely to me that bringing games to PC, at least the ones that are over a year old, is hurting Sony’s console sales ( their refusal to make the PS5 more affordable is almost certainly the biggest culprit there).

So yeah, it’s unfortunate that Sony appears to be shifting away from the PC audience. At the very least, though, they’re also not going to waste resources (and players’ time) on a custom launcher. I don’t know how PC gamers tolerate all of these obnoxious extra launchers that every publisher insists on having. If it were me, I would simply refuse to buy a game if it wasn’t on Steam and/or required an outside account. I just want to play my games, so any additional barriers are an instant dealbreaker.

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That’s just me, though. How do you feel about extra launchers on PC? What about the coming PSN rebrand?

Image by Flickr user Fe Ilya (CC BY-SA 2.0)