PlayStation exclusives have been mind-blowing for decades now. In the past few years, PlayStation Studios has made their exclusives available to PC players. One among the very famous exclusives was God of War.
Yes, this was exclusive to PC. These numbers do not justify the overall impact God of War has had in stores because the PC launch was after the PlayStation 5 exclusive launch. Either way, it was considered a successful launch and had an unprecedented 75,000 players on the server at the same time.
As of now, Helldivers 2 has broken the “concurrent” players record by featuring 81,000+ players online at launch. This is now the official best launch day game release for PlayStation Studios.
The game developers struggle with various issues on launch, including matchmaking and server issues. The developers were forced to take the servers offline for a few hours before completely fixing these matchmaking issues.. It seems that the developers did not anticipate such a rush in the servers, and because of this, they had trouble dealing with the overload of players. The servers seem to be fine now, and the game is in full swing. The game is priced at $34.99 for both PC and console, with crossplay included. Unlike the steep Call of Duty prices, I feel this is a pretty solid price point for Helldivers 2.
Is Microsoft missing out again?
PlayStation Studios understood the importance of PC players and how to incorporate them into their ecosystem. For years, Sony was focusing only on its console crowd, and now, with games receiving releases on PC stores, Xbox has a lot of catching up to do for the years to come. Featuring games like God of War on PC allowed for many more players to enjoy the game, rather than just renting out a console just to catch the hype of the game. One thing that caught me off guard was the fact that, for Helldivers 2, both the PC and the console versions were launched together. This is probably the reason why Helldivers 2 hit those concurrent player numbers.
Where does Xbox come in between all of this? Though Sony has featured games for PC players, they still remain exclusive to the console space. Xbox, on the other hand, has announced that they will be featuring their exclusives in the PlayStation Store. After the Bethesda acquisition, it looks like Microsoft is focusing on game development rather than console hardware. Whether they completely drop console manufacturing is still yet to be known, but reports suggest that Xbox might be working on their last generation of consoles and handheld devices before fully going into game production only.
With Disney buying a stake in Epic and PlayStation featuring PC games, Microsoft has a lot of catching up to keep up with the big players. For now, all they can do is attempt to get players from other platforms to play their games. Allowing PlayStation players to play Xbox games opens up a possibility for a partnership with PlayStation. Xbox can further build upon this partnership and deliver titles that are not just limited to the Xbox Game Store.
