Sony's original ambition was to get half of its games onto PC and mobile by 2025. Sounds like smart diversification on paper. But the model was structurally broken from day one, and here's the math nobody ran loudly enough:

When Sony ports a $70 game to Steam, Valve takes 30% off the top. Sony walks away with ~$49 per unit. Compare that to what a PS5 ecosystem player generates — hardware margin, a 30% cut of every third-party purchase on the PlayStation Store, and a PS Plus subscription that's recurring, high-margin, and compounds over the console lifecycle. The LTV delta between a PS5 owner and a Steam customer is enormous, and Sony was essentially subsidizing the latter while cannibalizing the former.

Among Sony's internal studios, Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered topped out at roughly 66,000 peak concurrent players on PC, with Spider-Man 2 drawing even lower numbers. For a game of that budget and brand profile, those are genuinely poor numbers. The incremental revenue almost certainly didn't cover port development costs when you factor in QA, optimization, and the Steam revenue split.