Video Game Insights: How much money has PlayStation made by releasing games on Steam?
Revealing what the new strategy is bringing to the table.
Until 2020, Sony had released only 3 games on Steam. The first of them was the original Helldivers. The strategy shift began with the release of Horizon: Zero Dawn in August 2020, after which Sony released 14 projects on PC. And it doesn’t plan to stop.
PlayStation performance on Steam
Including Helldivers II, Sony has sold 28 million copies of its games on Steam. Without counting the latest hit, it's 17 million copies.
Over the past 4 years, PlayStation games on Steam have earned $830 million. Helldivers II accounts for 34% of this amount.
Using Horizon Zero Dawn as an example: out of 24 million copies sold, 3.7 million were on PC (15%). According to VGI estimates, the game earned $120 million on PC and around $500 million on PlayStation. Thus, releasing on Steam increased sales by about a quarter. Considering that the entire game cost about $47 million to develop, the PC port alone has recouped the development cost several times over.
However, revenue from PC ports is a small part of Sony's overall gaming revenue. In the 2023 fiscal year, the PlayStation business earned $29.4 billion.
Ghost of Tsushima Case Study
Ghost of Tsushima, released in May 2024, sold 800 thousand copies in Steam in the first 20 days. The launch is comparable to the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man and Horizon: Zero Dawn.
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Moreover, Ghost of Tsushima retains users better. On the 20th day, the project had twice the CCU (concurrent users) compared to the two aforementioned projects.
VGI, analyzing the success of Ghost of Tsushima, notes that the project approached its launch with 1.428 million wishlists.
The audience of Ghost of Tsushima overlaps significantly with the audience of other PlayStation games on Steam. In the top-10 for overlaps, 5 are from PlayStation.
