The era of PlayStation’s first-party games making a guaranteed leap to PC is officially coming to a close. Sony Group Corp. no longer plans to release its big PlayStation 5 games on PC, marking a major shift in strategy that sees the video-game maker returning to console exclusivity after six years of flirting with multi-platform releases.

The massive shift in direction was reportedly highlighted by Hermen Hulst, CEO of PlayStation’s Studio Business Group, during a recent company town hall, with further details emerging from people familiar with the company’s inner workings.

While online live-service games like Marathon and Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls will still be released across multiple platforms, core narrative single-player titles are being pulled back behind console walls.

This means highly anticipated internally developed games, including last year’s samurai hit Ghost of Yōtei, Saros, and Insomniac Games’ upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine, will remain strictly exclusive to the PlayStation 5. For the foreseeable future, the only way to experience these flagship adventures will be on the console hardware, which currently retails at $599.99 ($649.99 for the disc-drive model).

For decades, Sony’s classic tactic for selling hardware was to keep tentpole franchises exclusive to its own consoles. In 2020, it pivoted and began bringing heavy hitters like God of War and The Last of Us to personal computers via Steam.

However, the strategy has been muddled and confused many players. Most PC releases arrived months or years after the games came to PlayStation, the release cadence appeared haphazard, and requirements forcing PC players to create PlayStation Network accounts sparked significant backlash.

Now, Sony is looking to take a more straightforward approach by going back to console exclusives. Sources caution that while plans could shift due to the unpredictable nature of the industry, PlayStation has actively scrapped plans to bring its internally developed catalog to PC.

Barring any unexpected changes, Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Ember Lab’s upcoming Kena: Scars of Kosmora—both made by external developers but published by PlayStation—will stand as the final titles still planned for release on PC this year.

Industry analysts suggest the pivot is driven by stark financial realities. Recent data indicated that Steam sales for massive PS5 ports like God of War Ragnarök and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 underperformed compared to their predecessors. Furthermore, a faction within PlayStation has expressed concern that releasing games on PC risks damaging the console’s brand and will hurt long-term hardware sales.

Another major factor behind Sony’s sudden pivot may be Microsoft’s next Xbox hardware. Rumored to use Windows and be fully capable of playing PC games, some executives at PlayStation were reportedly not thrilled at the prospect of one of the company’s flagship games running on a rival Xbox console.

With Nintendo sticking firmly to its own Switch hardware and Microsoft turning into a fully multi-platform publisher, Sony has made its choice clear: if players want to follow the continuing journeys of PlayStation’s biggest icons, they will have to buy into the PlayStation console ecosystem to do it.