New findings reinforce why Sony may leave PC behind and release new first-party singleplayer games on PlayStation instead

According to a LinkedIn profile, it took Sony 3 years to make $300 million in revenue from PC. That's indeed true, and something that the company actually revealed way back in 2023.

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Reports indicate that Sony may stop releasing its new first-party singleplayer games on PC. Instead, the company might double down on PlayStation exclusivity and lock these must-have games behind consoles in a bid to preserve the integrity of long-term sales.

Now we have more context on that report, and the truth is that the data itself--and the context around it--has been there for years. As per the LinkedIn page of former PlayStation division PC planner Jerry Liu, Sony earned only $300 million from PC sales across the first 3 years.

"Managed all business operations functions for PS PC group, helping the unit grow from $0-300M in Net Revenue for Sony in 3 years," reads a bullet point on Liu's profile.

This got me thinking--hadn't Sony actually reported its PC revenues before? After scouting around the segment briefings I had saved, I found that Sony actually had.

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On page 25 of Sony's business segment document from 2023, the company outlined how much money it earned from PC games across multiple fiscal years.

In FY20, Sony had made $35 million; in FY21, that boosted to $80 million; and in FY22, that rocketed up to $250 million, largely due to Sony's acquisition of Bungie--alongside a steadily growing catalog of games. By the end of FY22, Sony would have 9 first-party games on PC, sans Bungie.

This appears to be net revenue, and not gross revenue.

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A bit ago, I put together a big bar chart that showed how much money that Sony reported it had generated from PC games. I took the yen amount and converted directly into USD to plot a dollar amount, and then assigned the games to each fiscal period.

Adding the data that's plotted for FY22 yields a value that's much higher than what Sony reported; $501 million, compared to the $250 million that Sony had reported for FY22.

This indicates that the values that are published in Sony's quarterly reports represent gross revenue, that is the total amount of money that the games earn before Valve takes its cut, and the numbers in the segment briefing represent net revenue, or earnings that represent Sony's actual take-home value.

The numbers just give an interesting look at gross vs net revenue, as well as providing key context around Sony's potential thinking about PC. It's fair to say that, long-term, these IPs and first-party games could be more valuable to Sony if they were kept on PlayStation simply because the company's gross and net revenues are more evened out, and Sony wouldn't have to watch Valve hoover up portions of its revenue along the way.