PlayStation says half of its releases will be on PC and mobile by 2025

The president of Sony’s PlayStation business has said the company expects half of its annual releases to be on PC and mobile by 2025.

Speaking during a business briefing on Thursday, SIE president Jim Ryan said that expanding to the larger platforms, and in particular committing to releasing at least 12 live service games in the coming years, could be “transformational to our business”.

“PlayStation Studios historically has executed wonderfully in the delivery of a strong portfolio of narrative rich, graphically beautiful single-player games, but it’s certainly the case that we have restricted ourselves to a rather narrow portion of the gaming market,” Ryan said.

“By expanding to PC and mobile, and it must be said… also to live services, we have the opportunity to move from a situation of being present in a very narrow segment of the overall gaming software market, to being present pretty much everywhere.”

He continued: “I think if we do this right, if we execute with intelligence and we execute with excellence, the opportunities for significant growth in the number of people who play our games, the number of people who enjoy our games, and the number of people who spend money on our games, is exponentially a large one.

“I would say for example, if we are successful in making a portion of the 12 live service games that we have in development in PlayStation Studios… if only a portion of those enjoy critical and commercial success, then the impact of that over time will be completely transformational to our business structure.”

A slide shared during Ryan’s presentation also seemed to suggest that PS4 releases would be phased out by 2025.

Sony’s first modern PC ports were Horizon Zero Dawn in August 2020, Days Gone last May and God of War earlier this year. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy will also make the jump to PC year.

Jim Ryan has previously confirmed PlayStation will bring “a whole slate” of games to PC.

PlayStation recently acquired Nixxes Software, which is best known for its work on the PC versions of Square Enix properties including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Hitman and Thief, to help it bring its games to the platform.

In mobile, SIE has long been preparing for a significant push into the market. Last October, SIE appointed former Apple Arcade content boss Nicola Sebastiani to lead the company’s mobile operations, following job ads that stated it was opening a new business unit to adapt its “most popular franchises” for mobile.

The following month, Jim Ryan confirmed the platform holder was planning to bring some of its “iconic IP” to mobile during its current business year ending in March 2022.

“We have been thinking about how players enjoy our content and have had some early success with experimenting with mobile games and apps to provide more choice to gamers,” he said. “Mobile is just one of the areas we are exploring to reach millions of gamers beyond our platforms.

“PlayStation has a huge catalogue of diverse first-party IP that can transition to smartphone gaming and complement our AAA games or live service games. We are exploring the mobile market with some wonderful PlayStation franchises so please stay tuned.”