Inevitably, titles on the PC are considered to be the penultimate; with modding support, DLC packaging, and the wild bevy of options and features that PC users enjoy people simply tend to take note when developers announce that they’re bringing the title over to the PC userbase.
So this report is almost expected for many, although it marks a nod precisely because of how hard Horizon Zero Dawn stumbled when it came out of the gates on PC with frame rate and crashing issues along with more than a few interesting bugs that had people attempting to play through the game as little Aloy.
PlayStracker has announced, based on Steam‘s offered metrics, that Horizon Zero Dawn has a 35% double-dip, meaning that 35% of the users who have purchased and played the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn own and played the title on PlayStation prior to the port.
Considering that Horizon Zero Dawn is struggling to get out of a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam, that’s a massive achievement that is rivaled only by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 5 which sits at 38% users who played the title on a console prior to picking up the title on PC when it finally released.
35% of Horizon Zero Dawn owners on @Steam already played the game on @PlayStation.
This is a significantly higher "double dip" rate than usual even for delayed PC releases, rivaled only by Grand Theft Auto V. pic.twitter.com/1xQx5AlNDn
— PlayTracker (@PlayTrackerNet) August 11, 2020
This is a big reason that Rockstar has begun staggering releases between consoles and PCs: to maximize earnings with those that are willing to double-dip for the same title across two or more platforms.
It would be interesting to further this comparison by adding the Nintendo Switch to the mix, as it brings about portability that neither PCs nor consoles have, which makes the trifecta: convenience, power, and portability.
The odds of Horizon Zero Dawn ever leaping into the Nintendo Switch realm is astronomically low, however, if based on nothing else other than the struggles of Guerrilla to understand the PC market.
Perhaps the most surprising part of this is that developers who only traipse about in one singular platform are shooting themselves in the proverbial foot, considering the number of people that each platform holds results in a promise of far more prospective consumers rather than the limitation of a singular console. This somehow continues to elude and confuse developers.
More interesting is what Guerrilla Games possibly meant with their message towards PC gamers that they hope they would pick up a PlayStation 5 to continue Aloy’s journey in the next iteration of the IP.
Whether or not we’ll see the next iteration of Horizon Zero Dawn (and PlayStation users throwing things) likely boils down to whether or not the revenue gained from the porting over to PC was profitable enough to deal with the headache of bugs and glitches, along with users asking for a FOV slider.