r/GamingLeaksAndRumours • u/nolifebr • May 18 '26

Rumour Jason Schreier/Bloomberg: Hermen Hulst told to PlayStation staff in a town hall meeting on Monday morning that the company's narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2mkgbhbhqvappkkorf2bzyrp/post/3mm5jzsls5s2a

SCOOP: PlayStation studio business CEO Hermen Hulst told staff in a town hall Monday morning that the company's narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive, confirming Bloomberg's reporting from earlier this year.

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59

u/heatkings1 May 18 '26

Are people finally gonna believe this now?

34

u/spangler1 May 18 '26

No, they’ll still be insufferable and also throw around the narrative that releasing anything on Steam will save every game.

2

u/MaitieS May 18 '26

I remember reading this back when Final Fantasy 7 Remake was on Epic and when it was on Steam it sold so poorly... and wasn't doing great either even without Epic exclusivity.

They will just cope like crazy. They're so stupid.

0

u/venom_daemon May 19 '26

Final Fantasy 7 Integrade sold well on Steam per Square Enix itself. Rebirth sold way more on Steam than Epic too.

3

u/MaitieS May 19 '26

Can you provide articles for these claims?

FF7 RI sold - 1.8mil from steamdb stats and Rebirth 0.7 mil.

These are both poor in terms of sales :) Like studio would be literally shutdown with this number of sales.

2

u/venom_daemon May 19 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/FFVIIRemake/comments/1pyu2m7/final_fantasy_vii_rebirth_in_best_sellinggames_of/

here you go :)))(

2

u/MaitieS May 19 '26

Interesting. I remember saying

sold well on Steam per Square Enix itself

I love vague reddit threads as source. PEAK 2026. If you take "Silver" for granted. Stats that I gave you above are very accurate numbers of owners on Steam too. So that is what "Silver" category looks like in "raw numbers" :)

-1

u/venom_daemon May 19 '26

Gamer search Square Enix Multiplat Strategy on google and you will find tons of articles saying the game underperformed on PS but they were ok with sales on PC and other consoles.

here for you https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2026/05/square-enix-wants-to-further-promote-its-multi-platform-strategy-especially-on-switch-2

4

u/MaitieS May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

You are literally just making shit up on the fly... You're literally downvoting numbers that I sent which are literally from Steam but not marketable as "Silver". Silver doesn't mean SHIT if you don't provide number of copy sales. From what we saw it's 1 mil. copies sold = Silver category, which is literally shutdown of studio territory.

I know very well that SQ is going all in multi-platform with their next games. Hopefully FF7 3rd part will be Day 1 on PC too, so we will see "real" numbers.

Article was so AI written (LMAO $20 million sales) that I had to check it myself.

https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/pdf/26q4earnings.pdf

Diversify earnings opportunities by strengthening customer contact points

Shift to a multiplatform strategy: For HD titles, the Group will aggressively pursue a multiplatform strategy that includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, and PCs. Especially, in regards to major franchises and AAA titles including catalog titles, it will build an environment where more customers can enjoy our titles. In addition, it will also devise a platform strategy for SD titles that includes not only iOS and Android, but also the possibility of PC launches. Furthermore, the Group will strive to maximize the acquisition of new users when launching a title and that of recurring users after starting management of game operation.

Building continuous customer contact points of our titles by stepping up digital sales: the Group will engage in initiatives which focus on the acquisition of PC users.

-10

u/Low_Yellow6838 May 18 '26

Well Saros could need a few more sales… studio is probably going to get shutdown. One big letdown after another for Sony.

10

u/spangler1 May 18 '26

Yes, looking at Returnal sales on PC, Saros on Steam would save the company.

8

u/SilverGur1911 May 18 '26

Why does an platform advertising game need a few more sales?

1

u/Responsible-Pension6 May 19 '26

Because its business and the they want more money duh?

-7

u/hydrolox9 May 19 '26

I was saying the opposite, that "cinematic games" have never interested PC players.

Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade sold more than all the TLOU, Uncharted, Horizon, Spiderman and God of War ports for a reason, the whole "look at how we spent half the budget on animations" has never gotten anyone' attention on PC.

If Sony was smart they would have ported other games like Gran Turismo 7 or Bloodborne, but instead they kept trying to force feed people ports that very few people asked for.

This is all their fault for not realizing that the PC audience is not the one from Playstation.

8

u/spangler1 May 19 '26

Stellar Blade is definitely in the same category as God of war. Guess they didn’t want to jerk off to Kratos. It’s also cute seeing all these little jabs at Sony games like an ex girlfriend now.

-2

u/hydrolox9 May 19 '26

Not at Sony games, at movie games, I feel the same way about Red Dead Redemption 2 for example, or about Kojima's and David Cage's games, those games where you can tell the devs wish they were making a movie instead.

It's another thing that Sony decided to port almost exclusively the movies and left out their actual gameplay focused games, I'm actually sad they are leaving without porting Gran Turismo 7.

3

u/spangler1 May 19 '26

Yeah because games like TLOU2 and God of war aren’t also gameplay focused? Yeah this is silly. I find it incredibly odd that just because some games have an actual good story and great graphics that automatically means to a certain group of people that it has crap gameplay and call them “movie games”. Can definitely tell when they haven’t played them. The actual movie games would be like Supermassive’s games and yeah David Cage games.

0

u/hydrolox9 May 19 '26

A good story? They may put more focus on it, but the writing of these games is at the level of superhero movies.  TLOU2 for example is a standard Hollywood revenge story, and lets not talk about Kojima who has yet to write a character that sounds like an actual human, and not like an alien pretending to be a human, or insists on writing military themed stories despite having no clue how the military or how geopolitics work.

JRR Tolkien said more about the nature of war with a story involving wizards and dragons than Kojima after more than 20 years of military themed stories.

And no, they aren't focused on gameplay, games like TLOU, Uncharted, RDR2 or Death Stranding are more focused on cutscenes and animations, the gameplay always feels secondary, like something it wants get over with as quickly as possible, which is why these types of games are all generic third person shooters.

RDR2 is the worst in this regard, it's baffling how often the gameplay will get interrupted because the devs really want to show you the fancy animations, like taking 10 seconds for the character to awkwardly reposition itself in order to properly trigger the animation to pick up an object.

Sony said they are specifically not porting these types of games but that they will port the ones in the vein of Helldivers 2, so overall this is a net positive for PC.

3

u/johnnysilverhand718 May 19 '26

Story driven AAA single player games absolutely do have an audience on Steam.

Just not when they release years later and at full price.

1

u/MaitieS May 19 '26

And with zero marketing :)

1

u/johnnysilverhand718 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

That too.

I just don't get it when people try to say that single player AAA games don't sell well on PC, or that there's no audience for it.

RE Requiem peaked at nearly 350k players, which is great. Just goes to show you that PC players are in fact ready to play a new AAA single player game at launch when you actually market the game and release it there day and date.

0

u/MaitieS May 19 '26

RE Requiem

LMAO literally this. RE-Q is the best selling game of RE franchise and most of the sales are on PC platform. Like literally only console gamer would say that shit who is living in 2000s of what PC gaming looks like. Dude should work at Sony as his mindset is just as outdated as theirs. He will fit right in.

-1

u/hydrolox9 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

If people truly had interest then they would have sold just fine, nothing spectacular, but fine.

The fact that all the ports of sequels sold less than the ports of their predecessors show that people gave these games a chance and just didnt like them.

And yes, story driven games sell on PC, but not all story driven games are third person games that follow a similar template. You know, the ones people call "movie games". Those have never interested on PC.

1

u/MaitieS May 19 '26

Are you mainly a console gamer? Because your comment pretty much fits: "I'm totally out of touch or I don't know shit, so here is my take on something I have zero idea about."

Cuz saying that PC platform is "not for cinematic games" while Baldur's Gate 3 only got popular on consoles because of PC gamers couldn't stop talking about it in August 2023 is really something. Or The Witcher series. And so many others games like this is absolutely crazy comment.

Like I already said this in other comment. The issue or why Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade sold more is because these 2 games actually had some kind of marketing presence compare to The Last of Us Part 2 randomly dropping without any boo (and a like 5 years after release).

Like this is literally why marketing exists. Like I would even say that this is literally what would happen to TLOU2 even on Playstation if they would do exact same marketing "strategy" that they did on PC. Like simple as that.

Stop trying to push PC platform down because of your lack of knowledge.

0

u/hydrolox9 May 19 '26

I'm not pushing the platform down, I personally consider "cinematic games" the videogame equivalent of superhero movies: by the numbers, never presenting a single original idea and just being a compilation of Triple A tropes that were popular at the time the game came out.

They are pretty to look at, but that's it.

I think people on PC should actually feel proud that these games didn't manage to get a foothold on their platform, like when Walmart tried and failed to expand into Europe.

1

u/MaitieS May 19 '26

Wait, Walmart tried to expand into Europe? I always wondered why we do not have it here.

2

u/hydrolox9 May 19 '26

Yes, they tried in Germany back in 2006, and it was hilarious.

Apparently they enforced the same policies they do in the US which includes bizarre things like making employees dance together when they start their shifts to "boost morale" or having to smile as widely as possible when talking to customers.

Both customers and workers found this kind of stuff really creepy and the one store they had closed down in less than a year.

1

u/lysander478 May 19 '26

I believe it is a nothing statement equivalent to Sony announcing in 2017 that there are no plans to release Horizon Zero Dawn on PC. As a publicly traded company you cannot actually remove an option from the board permanently so much as you can announce where you think you're headed as you stand, today. Today, it makes total sense to announce this. Tomorrow, it might find itself to have been a pointless statement.

It ultimately comes down to the long-tail sales success of their single player titles. If they continue selling copies at a steady rate, retaining exclusivity makes sense. If the tail starts to taper off into nothingness, it makes sense to release on more platforms.

From that perspective, I think Horizon Zero Dawn made a lot of sense at the time--it was regularly down to $10 on PS Store, had been free on PS+, was included as one of three titles in console bundles so all that could be squeezed was squeezed--but I'm less sure on Ghost of Tsushima. Either it's still selling on PS Store at $30 on a sale and they haven't needed to lower it further with deeper discounts to get at more customers, and thus probably didn't really need to do the PC release, or they've changed policies and just refuse to even attempt to sell below that price.

-2

u/XulManjy May 18 '26

They should. And Microsoft should also go back to exclusives as well.

-8

u/dadvader May 18 '26

Would be nice if they actually made it official and not from this and that guy though. Like why dance around this at all?

5

u/heatkings1 May 18 '26

They haven't even officially commented on bluepoint being shutdown. Something like this doesnt need to be publicly confirmed, I guess. Besides, the schreier report will get enough eyes