The rumors of Horizon Zero Dawn coming to PC have been confirmed in a recent PlayStation blog interview with the Head of PlayStation’s Worldwide Studios, Hermen Hulst.
“Yes, I can confirm that Horizon Zero Dawn is coming to PC this summer,” Hulst said. “There will be more information coming from Guerrilla, from the new studio directors [Michiel van der Leeuw, JB van Beek, and Angie Smets] pretty soon.”
This is a big deal for reasons other than the incredible quality of Horizon Zero Dawn and the idea that PC gamers will soon be able to experience it on their preferred platform. See, Horizon was developed by Guerrilla Games, who were purchased by Sony in 2005. As many of you probably know, Sony doesn’t typically let its studios release games on PC or any other platforms for that matter. Death Stranding is coming to PC, but Sony doesn’t actually own Kojima Productions and it’s not publishing the PC port of the title.
There’s one more twist to this story that makes it all that much more interesting. In 2019, Sony named Hermen Hulst as the new head of PlayStation’s Worldwide Studios. Prior to accepting the position, Hulst was managing director and co-founder of Guerrilla Games. Before you start getting any grand ideas in your head, Hulst wants you to know that for the moment, the decision to port Horizon to PC is (at least at the moment) a relatively isolated incident.
“I think it’s important that we stay open to new ideas of how to introduce more people to PlayStation, and show people maybe what they’ve been missing out on,” Hulst said. “And to maybe put a few minds at ease, releasing one first-party AAA title to PC doesn’t necessarily mean that every game now will come to PC. In my mind, Horizon Zero Dawn was just a great fit in this particular instance. We don’t have plans for day and date [PC releases], and we remain 100% committed to dedicated hardware.”
Frankly, it’s still downright shocking that the PlayStation team is implementing any kind of PC port strategy. Sony has opted to be a little more isolated in recent years in comparison to some of its console competition. The publisher even controversially ignored the world of console cross-play for quite some time (even if it did eventually reverse that policy).
With Microsoft bringing more and more modern “Xbox” titles to PC and Japan becoming more interested in PC gaming, it’s really not that unreasonable to suggest that the PlayStation team could eventually port some of its biggest titles to PC after a period of PlayStation exclusivity.
Now, we just have to hope that this means that games like Bloodborne and Persona 5 will finally be ported to PC. In any case, we’d certainly argue that this decision opens up possibilities that we would have never previously legitimately considered.
