Sony pulling back from PC also means it's pulling back from China

Jun 14, 2026 - 07:17

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Sony pulling back from PC also means it's pulling back from China

Sony's surprise decision to reverse its strategy of porting singleplayer PlayStation games to PC has been scrutinized plenty. Bluepoint Games' head of technology suggested it was likely because Sony's more worried about Valve than about Xbox, while our own Morgan Park pointed out that Sony is only robbing us of maybe four half-decent games.

Alinea Insights has been analyzing sales of PlayStation games more generally, but with some interesting info about the PC side of things for us to dig out. Like the fact a full 42% of Death Stranding 2's PC sales came from China, which was its "biggest Steam market". Alinea notes that "China is a top market for Stellar Blade on Steam as well."

According to Steam's last hardware survey, 39.48% of Steam users have their language set to English and 21.85% to Simplified Chinese, making it the second-most popular language by a large margin—every other language is a single-digit percentage or less. It's difficult to figure out how many actual people that comes to though, since a bunch of those accounts will inevitably belong to internet cafes. Some estimates put the number over 30 million. Whatever the actual figure, it's a sizable chunk of players to up and ignore because you want people to fork out for a PS5 to play Wolverine.

Shift Up, the developer of Stellar Blade, won't be publishing its sequel with Sony. In an earnings Q&A, the studio said, "we are formulating an optimal go-to-market strategy designed to maximize sales and reach a broad global audience from day one." For "broad global audience" we can probably substitute "Chinese audience".

Alinea also noted that releasing games on PC didn't seem to hurt sales on PlayStation. In fact, it had the opposite effect, with Death Stranding 2 having "its best two-week stretch since launch on Sony's platform" after coming to PC. And while it was on sale at the time, the same discount had run twice before with less effective results. Stellar Blade, which wasn't discounted on PlayStation when it was ported to PC, also enjoyed a simultaneous boost in PS5 sales.

Launching on PC gives a bump to how many people will stream a game and just talk about it on the internet in general, and word of mouth remains a good way to sell anything. No matter what language it's in.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.