The big picture: Samurai-themed media seem to be in fashion this year. Sony published the well-received Rise of the Ronin in March, FX’s Shogun is one of the highest-rated TV shows of 2024, Ubisoft is taking Assassin’s Creed to feudal Japan, and the PC conversion of Sony and Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima is one of Sony’s most popular games on the platform. The company’s aggressive stance on ports appears to be paying off, and the trend could continue with God of War Ragnarok’s potentially imminent PC release.
The PC version of Ghost of Tsushima became Sony’s most successful single-player game on Steam only four days after release. It recently passed God of War, but Helldivers 2 will probably lead by a mile for the foreseeable future.
Ghost of Tsushima, Sucker Punch’s open-world action game set in a romanticized 13th-century feudal Japan, has reached an all-time peak of around 77,154 concurrent players on Steam as of Monday, narrowly surpassing God of War’s 73,529. Other single-player first-party games that greatly benefited from the jump from PlayStation to PC include Marvel’s Spider-Man (66,436) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (56,557).
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However, Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 dwarfs Sony’s other PC releases at 458,709 players. Its day-and-date release alongside the PlayStation 5 version was likely a significant reason, as the other games came to PC three or four years after PlayStation.
Sony PC port subsidiary Nixxes has received praise for its job on Tsushima, which might be one factor behind its success. On top of all of the features PC users have come to expect with Sony’s conversions, it’s the first game to officially allow players to combine Nvidia DLSS super resolution with AMD FSR 3 frame generation, making 120fps more easily attainable on RTX 20 series and 30 series graphics cards. Furthermore, although Tsushima’s Steam page states that it doesn’t support the Steam Deck (probably due to the multiplayer), PC performance reviews note that it runs excellently on Valve’s handheld.
The game’s triumph comes despite restrictions from sale in the same 177 countries where Sony no longer offers Helldivers 2 following its PlayStation Network account linking scandal. Tsushima only requires a PSN account for its multiplayer mode, but purchasing the game to play even the story mode requires an account in a country with PSN services.
Sucker Punch’s game might not maintain its position for long though, as a God of War Ragnarok PC port could emerge soon if recent reports prove accurate. Within three months of its initial console launch in 2022, the game sold 11 million copies, making it the fastest-selling PlayStation game until Helldivers 2 arrived. A PC re-release stands a good chance of repeating its predecessor’s success on Steam.