Ex-Sony Executive Explains Why PlayStation Games Should Hit PC
Shawn Layden has stepped away from Sony Interactive Entertainment following the launch of the PlayStation 5. After joining the company when the original PlayStation was still new in the 1990s, he spent years steering multiple phases of the industry’s evolution.
Since his departure in 2021, a lot has shifted in the console market. Prices have climbed, publishers and investors have become more cautious, and PlayStation has most recently walked back its earlier approach to bringing games to PC at a measured pace. Layden, who helped shape that cross-platform plan during his time at Sony, has now weighed in on the company’s decision to drop it.
Former Sony Boss Argues That PC Waiters Weren’t Stopping PS5 Sales
Layden’s remarks were shared through an interview with PSI.
He opened by addressing what he called confusion surrounding his earlier push to put PlayStation games on PC.
“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about my decision to put [PlayStation] games on PC,” Layden said. “The PC strategy, at least in my view at the time, wasn’t primarily about chasing profit. It was about getting our intellectual property in front of people who might not otherwise encounter it. How do we make sure the world of Horizon is visible to players who aren’t already living inside the PlayStation ecosystem?”
Layden also clarified that the goal wasn’t simply to boost console purchases. “It wasn’t about driving hardware sales because, frankly, I didn’t believe that was going to happen,” he continued. “That said, as we expand our intellectual property into other formats—films, television, comic books, merchandise, whatever it may be—you want as many eyes as possible to recognize the character and understand the story.”
He then pointed to a long-standing industry reality: exclusivity still tends to be the biggest driver behind console buys, regardless of how the market talks about it.
With PlayStation now reversing course on the PC-timed strategy, Layden pushed back on the claim that delaying a PC release by about 18 months would harm PS5 sales.
“If someone believes that a game arriving on PC 18 months after launch somehow prevented a sale that would have happened 18 months earlier in the hardware business, I’d like to see how they can support that argument,” he said. “My view is that if someone is willing to wait 18 months for a PC version, we weren’t losing a sale to them. They weren’t going to buy the hardware anyway.”
Even with the shift away from the slower PC rollout, Layden suggested that certain types of Sony titles are likely to keep expanding to other platforms.
“If you have a massively multiplayer online game or a live-service title—especially a free-to-play game—then you have to go multi-platform, because the economics don’t work otherwise,” he explained.
Sony has signaled that it’s not walking away from live services anytime soon, even after several widely discussed setbacks. With that in mind, Layden’s comments imply that PC releases—and possibly Xbox versions as well—could remain on the table for future live-service projects, particularly given how difficult it can be for a brand-new service to break through and succeed.
