Sony is looking to expand its presence on PC and mobile devices over the next few years, ultimately hoping to have at least half of its games on those platforms by 2025.
Sony’s new goals were revealed during Sony’s annual investor day, where a chart indicated that only a quarter of its games will land on PC and mobile this year. It appears the company has seen the benefits of its recent PC releases — which have included previous PlayStation exclusives like God of War (2018), Days Gone, and Horizon Zero Dawn — all of which have contributed to a substantial uptick in net sales on the platform. As a matter of fact, Sony is forecasting that its PC sales will skyrocket to $300 million in 2022, an impressive increase over last year’s $80 million.
Of course, the news doesn’t come as a huge surprise. In mid-2021, Sony acquired PC-porting specialists Nixxes Software and brought on previous Apple Arcade head of content Nicola Sebastiani to lead the company’s push into mobile. It’s been clear for some time that Sony has been strategizing about how best to bring its games to an even larger audience.
“PlayStation Studios historically has executed wonderfully in the delivery of a strong portfolio of narrative rich, graphically beautiful single-player games,” said Jim Ryan, President of Sony Interactive Entertainment, during his presentations, “but it’s certainly the case that we have restricted ourselves to a rather narrow portion of the gaming market.”
Ryan continued, “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.”
In addition to revealing Sony’s aspirations for the PC and mobile markets, Ryan announced that the company is currently working on 12 live service games and that PlayStation 4 releases would be more or less entirely phased out by 2025.
Sony’s major PC releases include Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, both of which were previously released exclusively for the PlayStation 4.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.